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EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 
HIS LIFE AND WORK 




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tit- Jul 



EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

HIS LIFE AND WORK 

BY 

WILLIAM BELMONT PARKER 

M 
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

($&e HStoer#&e pre?? Cambribge 

1915 






COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY WILLIAM BELMONT PARKER 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published February IQ15 



FEB 25 1915 

'CI. A 391 868 



TO MY FATHER 



PREFACE 

It is more than ten years since, in a burst of 
enthusiasm and admiration, I undertook to 
prepare a "Life" of Sill. Enthusiasm and 
admiration have continued unabated, but cir- 
cumstances interposed to delay the work; not, 
I am now inclined to think, to its detriment. 
Had I gone forward unimpeded, working out 
the plan I then had in mind, the result would 
have been different, partaking of the nature of 
essay and criticism. But midway of my task I 
fell under the influence of that great master of 
the art of biography, Sir Leslie Stephen, whose 
dicta upon the subject changed the course I 
was taking. "Nobody," said he, "ever wrote 
a dull autobiography"; and he added, "The 
biographer can never quite equal the autobi- 
ographer, but with a sufficient supply of letters 
he may approach very closely to the same 
result." About the same time a saying of Sill's, 
which I had probably read half a dozen times 
without seeing its application to the matter in 
hand, came home to me and reinforced the 
remarks of Sir Leslie, — "Let a man write 
about himself. It's the only fellow he knows 
anything about." These have been my sailing 



viii PREFACE 

orders. Though Sill's letters are not so abund- 
ant as a biographer working on this principle 
might wish, they are not wanting except for 
brief periods, and so far as available they have 
been most generously placed at my disposal by 
Sill's family and friends. 

My obligations, therefore, are many and 
serious. My most grateful thanks are due to 
Mrs. Sill, not only for materials, but also for 
wise counsel and cooperation. To Sill's class- 
mates at Yale, Mr. Henry Holt and Franklin 

B. Dexter, as also to Miss Millicent W. Shinn, 
of California, I acknowledge a debt of grati- 
tude. Among many others to whom I am 
beholden for letters, recollections, and aid are 
Miss Heloise E. Hersey, Mr. Howells, and Pro- 
fessor Royce, and, to add those who are no 
longer living, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Daniel 

C. Oilman, and Ralph 0. Williams, Yale, '61. 

W. B. P. 

January 15, 1915. 



CONTENTS 

I. Ancestry and Youth .... 1 

II. His Life at College .... 12 

III. The Voyage 'round the Horn . . 36 

IV. California 51 

V. Settling Down . . . . .86 

VI. Teaching in California . . . 131 

VII. Man of Letters 190 

VIII. The Craftsman 220 

IX. Ave atque Vale 295 

Index . 305 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Edwabd Rowland Sill {Photogravure) . Frontispiece ^ 
From a photograph in 1875 by C. E. Watkins, San 
Francisco. 

Birthplace op Edward R. Sill, Windsor, Con- 
necticut 4 V 

From a photograph. 

Edward R. Sill, 1853 10 / 

From a daguerreotype. 

Edward R. Sill, 1861 32 ^ 

From a photograph taken in New York. 

Edward R. Sill, 1872 134 ^ 

From a photograph taken in Oakland, California. 

Home op Edward R. Sill, Berkeley, Cali- 
fornia 168 ^ 

From a photograph. 

Edward R. Sill, 1879 176 " 

From a photograph by Taber, San Francisco. 

The Home, Cutahoga Falls, Ohio .... 220 ' 

From a photograph. 



EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 



ANCESTRY AND YOUTH 

Like most American men of letters the 
author of "Opportunity" and "The Fool's 
Prayer" was a native of New England. He 
was born on April 29, 1841, in Windsor, af- 
fectionately called "Ancient Windsor," Con- 
necticut, where his parents, his grandparents, 
and forbears, reaching back to the foundation 
of the colony, had lived before him, one of his 
ancestors being the first minister of the church 
there from 1630 to 1670. His ancestry in- 
cluded some of the best stocks of New Eng- 
land — Walcotts, Grants, Edwardses, Ells- 
worths, Rowlands, Allyns; and one who was 
curious in such matters might trace his descent 
to Sir Thomas Ware, Knight, of Yorkshire, 
member of Parliament in 1613, and auditor- 
general of Ireland, or, even farther back, to 
Sir Nicholas Pyncheon, of Wales, Sheriff of 
London in 1532. 

There is an allusion to this Welsh strain in 
his ancestry, which had a sort of fascination 



2 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

for Sill, in a fragment of imaginative prose on 
" Can Tunes be Inherited? " 

"I have Welsh blood in my family, far back 
on my mother's side. By some freak of hered- 
ity the music of my Welsh ancestors has come 
down through six, eight, or ten generations, as 
a dormant germ, and come to life again — a 
dim, somnolent, imperfect life, to be sure — in 
a corner of my brain. I could almost fancy 
(though this I do not soberly believe, for it is 
explicable in other ways) that there has come 
down with it a visual picture of wild torchlight 
marchings and countermarchings in savage 
Welsh glens. So plainly do I see in my brain 
. . . visions that befit this strange, barbaric 
music. 

" I see mountain gorges at night. . . . Wind- 
ing along the pass comes a procession of my 
Keltic ancestors: it is a burial or some sav- 
age midnight gathering against the Saxon in- 
vader. Red torches flare in the midst of their 
smoke; some indistinct dark mass is borne 
among the leaders: and now and then there 
are metallic gleams along the vanishing line. 
They are small, dark men, half clothed in 
skins of beasts, and their wild eyes shine under 
streaming locks of black hair. A mountain 
stream beside them flashes its white bursts of 
foam out of the darkness under the crags, and 
continually there rises and mingles with its 



ANCESTRY AND YOUTH 3 

roar that fierce yet woeful music, half shouted 
and half sung." 

Coming down to later times : An ancestor to 
whom Sill was often compared was the Rever- 
end David Sherman Rowland, who was born in 
Fairfield in 1719, graduated from Yale in 1743, 
and became at once pastor over the church in 
Northwest Simsbury, now Granby, Connecti- 
cut. He was a man of high spirit and marked 
independence of character. When, in 1747, he 
went to be pastor of the church at Plainfield, 
Connecticut, he found some opposition to his 
installation, and thereupon, calling together 
two or three ministers, installed himself. In 
1762, he became pastor of the Presbyterian or 
Congregational church in Providence, where he 
ranked among the leading clergymen of the 
day, and had a notable part in the struggle 
then beginning for independence. So conspicu- 
ous was he on the side of the colonists, and so 
obnoxious to the British, that when the town 
of Providence was invested, he was obliged 
to make his escape with his family in a sloop, 
getting away under cover of night through the 
midst of the enemy's fleet. Later he settled 
at Windsor, Connecticut, and became pastor of 
the church, which was the oldest Evangelical 
church in America, and with the exception of 
the Southwark church, London, the oldest 
orthodox Congregational church in the world. 



4 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

His son, the Reverend Henry Augustus Row- 
land, Sill's grandfather, became a colleague 
with his father in the Windsor church in 1790, 
and served as pastor until the year of his death 
in 1835. 

On his father's side, Sill was descended from 
a race of physicians and surgeons. During the 
Revolutionary War, his ancestor, Dr. Elisha 
Noyes Sill, served with General Walcott's 
brigade at Saratoga, and later in Captain 
Spalding's troop, and was surgeon to the Con- 
necticut troops during Burgoyne's invasion. 
Sill's father, Dr. Theodore Sill, and his father 
before him, were physicians in Windsor, where 
his mother's father and grandfather were min- 
isters. These two strains, minister and doctor, 
mingled in Sill's character rather curiously, and 
give some explanation to the conflicting ten- 
dencies of his life. His father was one of the 
most beloved physicians of his time, and his 
visits were so welcome that it was said that 
some of the children of the town were suspected 
of playing sick so as to have Dr. Sill to tend 
them. It was from his mother, Elizabeth New- 
berry Rowland, that Sill inherited his brown 
hair and dark gray eyes: for he was decidedly 
a Rowland in appearance. She is described as 
a handsome woman with a certain stateliness 
of manner, and much natural distinction, and 
is still remembered as an intellectual, quiet 



ANCESTRY AND YOUTH 5 

woman, fond of the few good books of the day, 
with a special love for poetry and a tendency 
to melancholy. 

A classmate writes that Sill told him that 
this came to her son as an aversion from 
strangers and especially from crowds, but that 
Sill, recognizing it, overcame it in his later 
years. 

His father's house was the wide, low-built 
white house, shaded by a tall tree, that looks 
obliquely across the green toward the old 
church where ancestors both on the maternal 
and the paternal side had ministered. Here 
Sill's childhood was spent, until the death of 
his mother, when he was eleven, loosed the ties 
which bound his father to Windsor, and led to 
their removal to the West. There in little more 
than a year his father died also, leaving the boy 
of thirteen alone with no nearer relatives than 
uncles, aunts, and cousins. Shadowed though 
his youth was by family sorrows, which must 
have added to his naturally serious bent, — 
first the loss of his only brother, drowned while 
skating on the Connecticut River when Sill was 
six years old, the death of his mother, five 
years later, followed so soon by the death of his 
father, — the boy does not seem ever to have 
been morose or melancholy. In fact the only 
anecdotes, if they deserve to be called such, 
which are recalled of his early years, both point 



6 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

to an abundance of spirit which, along with an 
underlying seriousness, marked him all his life. 

One of these refers to his flying a kite on the 
day when he had just got a new straw hat. The 
wind being high and the kite needing more bal- 
last, he took off the new hat, poked a hole 
through the rim, tied it to the tail of the kite, 
and up it went, somewhat to the horror of his 
careful aunt. The other scrap, which appears 
to belong to the year he spent at Honesdale, 
Pennsylvania, relates the capitulation of a 
teacher, indicated as probably Pennsylvania 
Dutch by the dialect, who, having resisted as 
long as he could the boy's infectious spirit, 
broke out, "Veil, Sill, I dink den you vas dyiDg, 
you be making foolishness." This irrepressible 
playfulness of mood he seems never to have 
lost : it was one of the qualities which he had in 
common with Matthew Arnold whom he re- 
sembled in many points, and calls to mind Her- 
bert Paul's remark about Arnold, that he had 
a constant flow of high spirits which he never 
took the least effort to restrain. 

Equally slight are the glimpses of his boy- 
hood given by Sill himself. A hint of his com- 
fortable bringing-up, and a stronger intimation 
of his highly sensitive nervous organization, 
are given in a sentence or two from an unsigned 
essay in the "Atlantic Monthly." "The one 
daily torture of my own otherwise kindly 



ANCESTRY AND YOUTH 7 

handled childhood was the going to bed in the 
dark. I hated the dark, and have always hated 
it. Why could not some softly shaded light 
have been left for me to go to sleep by, and 
then withdrawn, instead of crashing down on 
my wide-awake eyes that horrible club of 
blackness?" 

Of veritable boyhood and daylight are these 
passing glimpses : — 

"As I go on in life, I find that two or three of 
the child's great spectacles still keep for me 
their freshness. One of these is the elephant 
leading the circus procession through the vil- 
lage street. I never could see it enough, that 
huge, unearthly shape, moving solemnly along; 
flapping its wings of ears not for common and 
mundane fly-guards, but in some mysterious 
gesture or ceremonial; bending its architectural 
legs in the wrong place; waving its trunk in- 
incantation; seeing none of the trivial street 
matters to right or left, but absorbed in Orien- ' 
tal dreams. I used to think it strange that* 
people who were rich enough should not have 
one always pacing about their own backyards. 

"Another of these spectacles of childhood 
that keeps its charm for me is the locomotive at 
full speed. . . . But the sight in which I still 
take the most childlike delight is the spring 
bonfire. . . . The offending sticks and straws of 
last year's garden life are gathered together 



8 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

into dry and light-tossed piles. Now the eager 
child is permitted, if he is good, the untold 
felicity of setting off the bonfire. 

"I am thinking of the early spring mornings 
in boyhood, when we used to go to the Little 
River to take up the gill-net for shad. A mist 
hung on the smoothly running water; there was 
an 'Oriental fragrancy' of spearmint from the 
moist bank; the rattle of the oar in the rowlock 
sounded preternaturally loud, echoing under 
the covered bridge at that perfectly silent hour. 
Then we boys begin to lift the strained top line 
of the net, pulling the skiff along by means of it, 
in a moment of delicious excitement. What is 
that dim spot of glimmering gold, far down in 
the dark waters? It grows, as we eagerly haul 
on the line, and the little waves plashed out by 
the boat make it waver and break, till it seems 
some huge and splendid prize like the mysteri- 
ous casket in the net of the Arabian fisherman." 

These are village glimpses — and of a New 
England village, such as Windsor was when Sill 
was growing up there sixty years ago. The 
staid, frugal, dignified village with its two or 
three hundred inhabitants was an almost ideal 
place for children to grow up in. The Sills 5 
house was one of the pleasantest in the village. 

Sill's childhood here is not difficult to recon- 
struct in fancy, but the years which lie between 
the death of his mother, when he was eleven, 



ANCESTRY AND YOUTH 9 

and his admission to Yale at sixteen, are 
blurred. Part of his time was spent at his 
uncle's in Cuyahoga Falls, near Cleveland, 
Ohio, where he met his two girl cousins and 
formed an attachment for one of them, his cou- 
sin Elizabeth Sill, which ultimately led to his 
marriage. After nearly two years in Ohio, Sill 
went to spend another year with an uncle at 
Honesdale, Pennsylvania, and following that 
spent a year at Phillips Exeter Academy com- 
pleting his preparation for college. It is rather 
singular that one who was to take so active an 
interest in literary pursuits in college should 
have given no sign of such interest during his 
years of preparation. The one recollection 
which has been evoked of him at Exeter is that 
he was called "Little Sill." 

Yet it is to this period that certain fugitive 
jottings of reminiscence belong which appear in 
his "Prose" and show a certain feeling for 
books and their contents. So he opens the 
little essay on "The Most Pathetic Figure in 
Story": "When I was a boy, the fate of Evan- 
geline the Acadian always seemed to me the 
most piteous of all that I had ever known. Not 
so much at the end, — the woefulness of that 
finding of her lover too late did not impress me 
so much till those words had taken on their 
deeper meaning from the experience of life; but 
the perpetual disappointment, the hope, not 



10 EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 

crushed and ended, but continually revived, 
only to be the 'hope deferred that maketh 
the heart sick,' — this seemed to me the pity 
of it." 

The second fragment belongs to the same 
sensitive and responsive boyhood, possibly to 
the year spent at Exeter: "It was in a Virgil 
class, and I was a poor little palpitating new 
scholar. While I was anxiously construing the 
opening lines of the Dido-in-the-storm episode, 
the beetle-browed master turned slyly to a 
privileged older pupil with some sotto voce 
schoolmaster's joke. As I glanced up, having 
partly heard the words without catching the 
point, he was just turning back to me, with a 
most genial and winning smile sweetening his 
usually acid features. Innocently, and no 
doubt with some timidly responsive look on 
my face, I said, 'What?' But on the instant of 
speaking I divined that, alas ! the grin was not 
meant for me. . . . He bade me in a stern voice 
to 'go on.' It was much as if he had cried, 
' What right have you to be smiling at me, you 
miserable little sinner ? ' " 

The third scrap of reminiscence may possibly 
belong to his early college days — say the 
Freshman year, when we are prone to writing 
things down in Commonplace Books and the 
like : — 

" I began, when a boy, to keep an index 




EDWARD R. SILL. 1853 



ANCESTRY AND YOUTH 11 

rerum. It never got farther than a beautifully 
arranged table of contents, and a few scattering 
entries made while the volume had the nutri- 
tious fragrance of the bindery still upon it. 
Among these entries, on a page headed Simili- 
tudes, are two similes, in very yellow ink. Now 
the interesting point is that I have totally for- 
gotten whether they were original or selected. 
I hope they were my own; but they sound more 
as if they might have come from Longfellow's 
* Hyperion,' or from some 'Conversation' of 
Landor's. It may be that every schoolboy 
(except myself) will recognize and locate them. 
. . . Here they are: 'This earthly life is like an 
album at an inn: we turn over its pages curi- 
ously or wearily, and write a scrap of wisdom op 
of folly, and away.' 'He who has loved and 
served an art is like the child that was nursed 
by Persephone : he is not subject to the woes of 
other men, for he has lain in the lap and on the 
bosom of a goddess.' " 



II 

HIS LIFE AT COLLEGE 

Sill entered Yale in his seventeenth year, a 
moderately tall, slender youth decidedly hand- 
some, with brown hair, gray eyes, and the stamp 
of personality which marked him off at once 
from the crowd. "We have n't got much of a 
class," wrote one of his classmates (Governor 
Baldwin) in his diary, "but Sill is somewhat of 
a genius, to be sure." Before the middle of the 
Freshmen year this was the accepted view of 
him. At the first trials of literary ability — the 
class song competition — Sill was seen to be 
easily first, and he soon took a special place 
among his classmates, which he kept. He was 
no athlete, and far from being the jovial good 
fellow, but he took his part in the sports and 
amusements of the college, played a creditable 
game of baseball, and held his own in the little 
world of the campus. The accounts given of 
him by his contemporaries indicate that he led 
a free, open life, never unduly hampered by 
college rules and regulations, reading a good 
deal in a desultory fashion, and, like Lowell at 
Harvard, getting rusticated for neglect of col- 
lege exercises. It is entered upon the records 



HIS LIFE AT COLLEGE 13 

that at the end of the Freshman year the 
Faculty voted that "E. R. Sill ('61) for neg- 
lecting his studies shall be removed from col- 
lege." He was away over a year. Twenty- 
five years later, when writing to Thomas Bailey 
Aldrich, then editor of the "Atlantic," he re- 
marked: "Let me confess, since I am addressing 
you personally, that while I preach college, and 
believe in it, I was myself a reckless student. 
In fact, I was on the retired list for a consid- 
erable part of the course because I wouldn't 
pursue the curriculum, and would pursue liter- 
ature." An instance of his somewhat cavalier 
attitude toward class routine is recalled by a 
classmate. It was the custom of the professor 
of Greek to call upon members of the class to 
rise and read aloud passages of the text, giv- 
ing beat, stress, and caesura. To this exercise, 
called "scanning," Sill had a strong distaste, 
and among the reasons for his rustication was 
his response, a response given with an air of 
extreme nonchalance, when called upon to scan, 
"Please, sir, I don't scan." 

Some notes by another classmate give a very 
good background for the figure of Sill as an 
undergraduate. At the time Sill entered Yale 
— in the fall of 1857 — he says : — 

"It was in many respects an unreal place. 
Despite President Woolsey's abiding interest 
and influence in some national questions, and 



14 EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 

he was about the only man in the faculty who 
manifested any, the institution stood apart 
from both the acting and the thinking world. 
The teaching it afforded was, with slight ex- 
ceptions, mere rote teaching. 

"Partly because of poverty, the college did 
not contain a professor of history, much less of 
American history — that subject was not even 
touched; a professor of any political or eco- 
nomic science; or a professor of any modern 
language. Our first lesson in respect for law 
was the formal presentation to each of us, of 
* The Laws of Yale College,' and the exaction 
of a written promise to obey them. They 
dated from an earlier generation, had not been 
brought up to date, any more than anything 
else in the institution had, and contained some 
laws that nobody thought of enforcing — among 
them, laws against smoking and going sailing. 
Our respect for them as a whole, and their effect 
on our young minds regarding laws in general, 
are obvious. 

"As to literature, we had recitations only 
from an elaborately and dogmatically anno- 
tated edition of Demosthenes' 'On the Crown/ 
in the original; and from Whateley's Rhetoric 
— a fantastic book which lent itself wonder- 
fully to undergraduate fun-making. The liter- 
atures of Greece and Rome were used solely 
as material for vocabulary and grammatical 



HIS LIFE AT COLLEGE 15 

* drills.' There was not a man in the faculty who 
had ever done anything in pure literature; or, 
so far as I can recall, anybody but Hadley and 
Dana and Whitney, the last two of whom we 
scarcely ever saw, who ever did any work in 
anything else that long survived them. We 
wrote 'compositions' three or four times, which 
were read to the class (or rather to each writer's 
one of its four divisions) and never criticized, 
and we had a few 'disputes' by groups se- 
lected in turn, before the 'division,' which 
were ' summed up ' and commented upon, with 
considerable literary instinct whenever Hadley 
presided. The topics set for these exercises 
were occasionally criticism of some author, but 
were equally apt to be some question outside 
of practical life, and often outside of practical 
consideration — for instance, one, I remember, 
was: 'Is Language of Divine or Human Ori- 
gin?' That question is a fair illustration of 
what was, on the whole, the dominating spirit 
of the college — theological speculation. The 
Puritan influence still controlled. The officers, 
as has been intimated, were nearly all Puritan 
clergymen, holding, in the midst of the nine- 
teenth century, the views they had inherited 
from the seventeenth, and avoiding and dread- 
ing the stir of thought which was beginning to 
tear down their whole system. The names of 
Carlyle, Darwin and Mill were never mentioned 



16 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

in the classroom, and the only notions given us 
of the doctrine of evolution, which had begun 
to take form, were in a lecture on Laplace's law 
of planetary evolution, and in a few then cele- 
brated lectures by Dana, read to us, in his dis- 
ability, by another. In them he tried to dem- 
onstrate that the evolution of the earth, and 
the life upon it, was in accord with the account 
given in Genesis. 

"Most of the men who regulated the 
'thought' of the institution were clergymen. 
Its trustees practically all were, the ' six senior 
senators' of the State being mere figureheads, 
and the representation of the alumni not yet 
having been instituted. 

"On one side, the atmosphere of the place 
was all 'discipline.' We were taught to over- 
come obstacles by obstacles being deliberately 
massed before us, as if learning in its most 
attractive forms did not present more than 
enough. In addition to the bare chronology of 
classic history, we were asked to commit to 
memory a murderous pamphlet of chemical 
formulas. The test of merit, rewarded with the 
honors, was the capacity to recite well. A rote 
repetition of the contents of the textbook 
answered the purpose as well as intelligent 
appreciation. Originality in any form was not 
stimulated, though one 'composition' (never 
criticized) did count as much as several reci- 



HIS LIFE AT COLLEGE 17 

tations. When President Woolsey offered to 
cushion the bare seats in the chapel at his own 
expense, the proposition was turned down as 
tending to make the students effeminate. 

"To this hated chapel, we were driven twice 
a day and four times on Sunday, one of the 
daily herdings being before daylight in win- 
ter. Some compensation for these monastic 
rigors lies in the fact that during one of them, 
Sill got the idea for 'Morning,' and it sym- 
bolized his feeling regarding the lights our 
teachers read by. 

"In short, everything was done to make 
learning and religion loathsome, and done with 
considerable success. Yet, as a body, the college 
officers were men of admirable sincerity and 
purity of life, But with, so far as I know, one 
exception, as to capacity to see beyond their 
narrow range of dogma, they may as well have 
been monks of the Thebaid, or priests of a 
lamasery in Thibet. That exceptional man — 
perhaps the most eminent scholar America has 
produced — we were hardly brought in contact 
with; and I did not suspect his largeness of 
view until we became intimate, years after my 
graduation. With pathetic self -repression, he 
stayed at Yale while out of sympathy with his 
colleagues and the whole intellectual spirit of 
the place. There may have been others who 
thought beyond their inherited dogmas, but if 



18 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

there were, they kept their thoughts to them- 
selves, as he did. Yet all those men gave us a 
rare example of single-hearted, self-sacrificing, 
and unswerving devotion to duty, as they saw 
it. But they had not the gift to see much of it, 
and so their example lacked inspiration. It is 
astounding that so much knowledge (one- 
sided though it was) and so much moral worth 
could have existed side by side with so much 
obtuseness. Yet the explanation is not far to 
seek: a generation earlier, a bright man could 
have been a Puritan; but in that generation, 
there had been so much stir of thought that 
none but a stupid man could grow up a Puritan. 
Some of the older men were bright, but their 
ideas were out of date. No younger man could 
be brought in unless he was a Puritan, and 
therefore no younger man abreast with the day 
was among the college officers. The scholarship 
was a narrow formalism. In the classroom, 
even Hadley, deep and broad as was his cul- 
ture, confined himself to Homer's grammar, 
with little or no reference to his poetry; though, 
as already intimated, in his comments on some 
of our scant rhetorical efforts, he showed him- 
self a delicate and suggestive critic. 

"Offsetting the atmosphere of 'discipline' 
was one of mediaeval, almost primitive, super- 
stition, mysticism, and dread. The students 
were affected by it so that their voluntary asso- 



HIS LIFE AT COLLEGE 19 

ciations, instead of being natural gentlemen's 
clubs, were ' secret societies/ designated by the 
usual mystic Greek letters, meeting as far as 
they could in secret places, with secret rites and 
strange initiations and mummeries. The chief 
of them had and still has, as a badge, a gold 
skull with crossed bones, each member dis- 
playing in his room, over the entrance, the real 
objects themselves. Merely to allude to this 
society in the presence of one of its members 
was to insult him and lead him to withdraw 
from the company. To become one of its fif- 
teen members in senior year was the controlling 
ambition of the other three years. The halls of 
these societies were used but one evening a 
week. At that time Skull and Bones was the 
only one having its own building. To guard 
its secrecy, it was made, as many halls have 
since been for other societies, without windows. 
Even a generation later, one of the societies has 
reared a superb (though rather poorly propor- 
tioned) white marble Greek temple, lit by the 
sun only through a skylight over its second 
story. The idea of a rational clubhouse to be 
enjoyed at all times, as the society buildings 
are at other institutions, was, and generally 
still is, too rational to fit the prevalent atmos- 
phere. Health, of course, was not taken into 
consideration. 

"Athletics in the present sense had not been 



20 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

evolved. Each class had three or four boat- 
clubs, crews from which used to go rowing in 
gigs on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, 
and occasionally at other times, and frequently 
took out guests — not seldom ladies, in the 
stern seats. The Wednesday and Saturday 
rows were curtailed by the necessity of getting 
back to 'prayers.' Sill joined one of these clubs 
in Freshman year, and pulled a fairly good oar. 
The club came to grief, owing to a certain un- 
congeniality between the faculty's system of 
things and the tastes and convictions of some 
of the club's members, including the captain, 
which led to the temporary separation of these 
members from the institution. 

"This uncongeniality between students and 
faculty was general and chronic. As there was 
no congeniality, far less was there any intimacy. 
The faculty generally consisted (with the ex- 
ception of the instructor of elocution, of whom 
we saw little) of men who had never been 
young. The idea of teacher and student spend- 
ing an hour together, outside of the effort on 
one side to detect ignorance, and, on the other, 
to conceal it, was seldom thought of before 
dear Timothy Dwight got back from Europe, 
after Sill's graduation; the idea of playing a 
game together would have been ludicrous; the 
idea of having a smoke together would have 
been insulting to the older men; and the idea 



HIS LIFE AT COLLEGE 21 

of taking a drink together, criminal. Once 
when I was 'called up' for some of my many 
peccadilloes, after I claimed that I was not 
given to strong drink, the argument against 
me was clinched with: 'But you admit that 
you play billiards and drink wine.' The rela- 
tion between students and faculty, on the part 
of the boyish boys and most of the thinking 
boys, was at best one of sullen indifference, 
and at worst one of strategic hostility. A stu- 
dent absent from one of the sixteen religious 
exercises a week, or one of the sixteen literary 
ones, or unprepared for one of the latter, was 
permitted to hand in a written excuse. The 
attitude of strategic hostility made, to the 
student mind, everything fair in war, and these 
excuses were very often lies. 'Indisposition' 
was the euphemism at the base of most of 
them, and it generally meant indisposition to 
attend or to study. I doubt if Sill handed in 
any of these false excuses, and I am confident 
that Shearer [Sill's closest friend, of whom 
more later,] did not, but neither of them 
lacked respect for anybody else because he 
did. 

"In telling all this, I feel a little as if I were 
sinning with the sons of Noah; but it must be 
told to explain Sill — to explain the gropings 
and vacillations and struggles that his early 
letters are full of. 



22 EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 

"Into the atmosphere I have tried to de- 
scribe, our poet was thrust when he was a boy 
of less than seventeen. The class, of course, 
contained a group of youths who, like their 
teachers, had never been superfluously young, 
took things as they were given them, and did 
their best with them — 'not theirs to ask the 
reason why.' Sill I did not see much of this 
conservative element in the class until he met 
some of them in Skull and Bones in senior 
year. There was, equally of course, another 
group full of young blood, much of it foolish 
blood, some of whom did 'ask the reason why,' 
and found precious little reason. Nearly all 
of them played much, only one or two of them 
studied much, two or three of them questioned 
much, several of them read much — some in 
books that the faculty would not have recom- 
mended, and all of them were in a state of 
more or less intellectual revolt. Some of them 
believed as long as they lived, and some of 
them believe to this day, that their revolt 
was well justified. To this group Sill naturally 
gravitated. He was perhaps the leader in the 
spirit of revolt. He was far-seeing. His alter 
ego, Shearer, was in the same group; but he was 
wide-seeing as well as far-seeing, and while he 
shared the spirit of revolt, he was, both by dis- 
position and comprehension, made to temper it. 

"Sill and Shearer were both poor, and 



HIS LIFE AT COLLEGE 23 

'pleasure' costs money. They were also proud 
and scrupulous: so, even if their disposition had 
been toward excess, it would not have been as 
easy to them as to some of their friends. Sill 
did most of the foolish things that were not 
dishonest which the other boys did, but his 
native delicacy made the restraint of his pov- 
erty superfluous in keeping him from any gross 
excess. While his principles were more those of 
Socrates than of St. Francis, his practice was 
nearer that of St. Francis than of Socrates. 
However pagan he may have been, it is incon- 
ceivable that he would have deliberately pur- 
sued his own pleasure to the detriment of 
another. He would take his share of the flowing 
bowl, unless his full share would have been too 
much, in which case there were always others 
ready to take the excess for him; but he was not 
intolerant of these friends, if otherwise they 
merited his regard — not half as intolerant as 
he was, at first, of intellectual inferiority. This 
absolutely prevented him, at first, from recog- 
nizing the merits of some of the most lovable 
fellows and finest characters in the class. But 
he outgrew it, and became a man of very wide 
sympathies and charitable judgments. 

"Not having grown up in the world where 
one amuses one's self; going to Puritan Yale 
where that world was unknown and abhorred, 
instead of to Harvard where it was known and 



24 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

appreciated; realizing its Philistine side, and 
having no opportunity to enjoy its aesthetic 
side, Sill hated it and every symbol of it. 
'Society' he would have nothing of. When his 
beauty and eloquence made all the girls, after 
they heard him deliver the class poem, wild to 
have him introduced, he stubbornly refused, 
even his dearest who wanted to introduce him 
to their dearest. Yet we know that, outside of 
'social occasions,' no man was more attracted 
by women. 

"Some of the lines from the class poem, not 
printed in the later selections, illustrate his 
attitude toward the world at this time : — 

"'The world! The world! 
Mockery, knavery, cheat! 
Down at thy angry feet 
Let the lying thing be hurled. 

"None of his portraits do him justice. They 
all strangely fail to give his face the character 
— or enough of the character — which would 
have led any observer to say: 'There is a poet.' 
He had the most wonderful gray eyes I ever 
saw; his wavy chestnut hair was just what it 
should have been; he wore no beard until he 
was thirty or forty, and was better without it. 
I believe he always wore a mustache, having, if 
I remember rightly, an enviable amount of it 
when we were freshmen. His figure was moder- 
ately tall, and slight — too slight, but very 



HIS LIFE AT COLLEGE 25 

graceful. We used to make fun of his lank 
shanks. But one day when I, who was taller 
and much heavier, put on the boxing gloves 
with him, I realized to my cost that strength 
was not an affair of muscle alone. By sheer 
nerve, he could do things that men with much 
i more muscle could not. I suppose he had to 
pay for it in subsequent fatigue. 

" Despite his slight figure, he had a beautiful 
rich bass voice; and he had, of course, as lyric 
poets must, a genius for music. He could play 
on any instrument he took a notion to, with 
very little practice. Yet I don't remember that 
he sang in the choir. Perhaps he would have 
been apt to refrain in those rebellious years, 
because of distaste for the service. 

"Though he was so frail-looking, I don't 
remember that he ever lacked health, though 
I find some anxieties expressed in some of 
Shearer's letters after graduation; but they 
were mainly, perhaps entirely, lest nervous 
taxes and uncongenialities should be too much 
for him. There was no need of his dying young, 
as we too sadly know. 

"Carlyle was probably the great teacher of 
most of us. It was too early for Mill and 
Spencer. Sill's chief influence was Tennyson. 
We all read Emerson and Macaulay. Browning 
we do not seem to have got to : we knew his wife 
better : she was nearer our then level. There is 



26 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

little indication of our then having much to do 
with Shakespeare. Sill does not even include 
him among the poets in the letter of a year 
before his death, quoted in the memoir prefac- 
ing the edition of 1902; but in his letter to me 
of December 24, 1868, from California, he says: 
'There's one compensation in living in a 
heathen country — i.e., that one's only com- 
panions are Shakespeare and Shelley and Mill 
and Browning and Spencer and the others.' 
Like our college teachers, we as boys lived most 
in speculations and dreams. 

"Nearly all the prizes offered by the faculty 
or the students for any feats but those of mem- 
ory and linguistic or mathematical skill, were 
divided about equally between Sill and Shearer. 
Of course they were elected on the 'Lit. 
Board,' and their contributions were awaited 
more eagerly, probably, than other contribu- 
tions ever were, by the whole college world : for 
the recognition of them was not confined to 
their own class. And of course they were 
elected (unanimously, I believe) Class Poet 
and Class Orator, though their 'scholarship' 
under the rote tests applied by the faculty, did 
not entitle them to an appearance on either of 
the stupid occasions (Junior Exhibition and 
Commencement) which the faculty provided to 
display the stupid results of their system. 

"Sill's independence, and the environment 



HIS LIFE AT COLLEGE 27 

in which he grew up, were both well illustrated 
in the great religious revival of '58. This, of 
course, set in as soon as spring began to stir 
people's emotions after the great commercial 
panic in the fall of '57. But instead of being 
restricted, as such phenomena have been since, 
mainly to those whose psychic stock-in-trade 
was merely emotional, it was taken up by peo- 
ple of culture (for those days), and by none 
more ardently than the faculty of Yale. The 
whole college was swept off its feet. In our 
class, Sill, Shearer, and one other were, I be- 
lieve, the only men who did not join the church. 
I have an impression that they were about the 
only ones in the academic department. The 
reaction was frightful. There probably never 
was at Yale such an orgy of dissipation as dur- 
ing the following autumn — certainly there 
was nothing like it in my time. This, of course, 
doubled the skepticism of those who were out 
of sympathy with the prevailing ideas, and left 
them in a more chaotic state than ever. Spen- 
cer had not yet put within general reach his 
point of crystallization for faith and hope, 
and thinking young men were in the dark and 
anxious atmosphere that pervaded Sill's and 
Shearer's early letters, and Sill's early poems." 

From the pen of still another classmate, 
Ralph O. Williams, I take a sketch of Sill at 



28 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

Yale, interesting not only because it is done by 
a contemporary, but also because it reveals the 
unusual and deep regard which Sill inspired in 
those who knew him, whether early or late in 
his life: — 

"There is lying near me a photographic por- 
trait of Edward Rowland Sill taken in his senior 
year at Yale College when he was not quite 
twenty years old. It is on glass, — an old- 
fashioned 'ambrotype.' I have seen perhaps 
half a dozen later photographs of Sill, taken at 
various periods of his life, but all the others 
made him less than he was. The picture before 
me reveals his extraordinary eyes, — large, 
oval, deep eyes, whose light seemed to come 
from the recesses of a reflective mind, — a 
penetrating light which disclosed the thoughts 
of those whom it rested on. People who had 
never seen or heard of Sill, looking at this pic- 
ture, have exclaimed, " What wonderful eyes ! " x 
In other respects, too, the picture is faithful. 
Sill was hardly more than a boy then, but 
much more than a boy in mind and character. 
His face — of regular, handsome features — 
seemed to be the face of one who had never had 
a mean impulse. It showed independence of 
judgment, but not aggressiveness. Notwith- 
standing its mobility of expression, it was a 

1 Some of the paper photographs of Sill give his eyes a staring 
look, — a fault probably introduced in retouching the negatives. 



HIS LIFE AT COLLEGE 29 

calm face, quite unconscious of itself, thought- 
ful, spiritual, considerate of others. As to the 
rest of his personality at that time, he was fully 
grown in height, straight, slim, not muscular, 
and in seeming good health, — though his 
health, without being decidedly bad, was not 
good. His dress was careless, but never slov- 
enly. 

"Sill's course in college could hardly have 
been different; at least, that must seem so to 
those who consider his temperament. By dis- 
position he was eager of instruction and learn- 
ing; he liked to think things out; but he was 
revolted by lessons that were to be recited 
parrot-like for a daily mark. Naturally he took 
as little of the lessoning as possible. But I 
never heard Sill speak unkindly of the wise men 
of down east who were doing it. He thought 
they were not in the best way; perhaps some of 
them, or some of their successors, would find a 
better way later. 

"In such opportunities as there were for 
exercising his literary power Sill shone from the 
beginning to the end of the college course. His 
poem * The Open Polar Sea ' was printed in the 
'Yale Literary Magazine' for April, 1858, while 
he was in his freshman year. It was published 
as 'From the German of Malvaro,' because the 
young freshman feared that the senior editors 
of the magazine would have a poor opinion of a 



30 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

freshman's output. The poem now entitled 
'Morning,' and beginning: — 

"'I entered once, at break of day, 
A chapel lichen-stained and gray,' — 

appeared in the 'Yale Lit.' for June, 1860. At 
that time Sill was near the close of his junior 
year and was one of the editors of the magazine. 
It happened that I saw a proof of the poem at 
the printer's just as the 'Lit.' was going to 
press. It differed verbally somewhat from the 
one printed many years later among his col- 
lected poems, and had as a concluding line, 
rhyming with the two immediately preceding 
lines, 'Was there not meaning in my dreams.' 
On my own responsibility (for there was not a 
moment's time for consulting the poet), I 
struck out that last line, because, as I told 
Sill afterwards, 'a fingerpost wasn't needed.' 
Instead of being vexed, he was grateful. The 
poem is a good example of how a trivial inci- 
dent which to the barren imagination has no 
significance can be made to glow by a poet's 
touch. The 'chapel' was the old college chapel, 
but not the one that is used for religious serv- 
ices now. The time was earlier than the com- 
position. It was of the days when we had to 
attend prayers at half past five on summer 
mornings and at half -past six winter mornings. 
There was no 'rich stained glass' in the chapel, 
nor an aisle in the architectural sense. There 



HIS LIFE AT COLLEGE 31 

were * ghostly shadows/ and 'the congregation 
dozed,' no doubt, excepting those who with 
bowed heads were conning the lesson for the 
succeeding recitation. The shutter was shifted 
by a gust of wind, not by one * who rose with a 
wistful face.' A dismal scene, and lowering in 
its influences; but with what charming color 
the boy artist overlaid the unwholesome fact. 
"In writing for college prizes, — although 
he was always successful, — Sill put under con- 
straint his best impulses; for he never had any 
desire to shine at the expense of others, and, 
besides, he looked on such contests as boyish. 
But he wanted to measure himself with others 
so as to get a scale of judgment, boy with boys, 
man with men later. Prizes for literary com- 
position brought him no elation, only a useful 
stiffening of self-confidence. And that he 
needed. But although he had such feelings, I 
am sure, about college honors, Sill then and 
always hungered for real distinction. Com- 
monplace successes that tickle the vanity and 
fill the wants of most men had for him no 
attractions." 

Sill's life at Yale fell at a time when the in- 
tellectual ferment of the past forty years was 
being prepared. Though the academic com- 
munity at Yale was for the most part immune, 
some of the yeast of question and revolt was 



32 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

stirring in his mind and in the minds of his 
friends. The first edition of Darwin's "Origin 
of Species" came out during his freshman year; 
Huxley had not come yet, but Carlyle and 
Tennyson were sowing inquiry broadcast, The 
unconventionality and austere discontent of 
Carlyle appealed strongly to Sill. With his eyes 
already opened to the inequalities of life, the 
Scot's grim challenge of accepted conditions 
awoke in him an eager emulation. All his 
writing in college echoes of Carlyle. "Poor 
petrifactions of men!" he writes in the first 
essay he contributed to the "Yale Literary 
Magazine." "... One shudders even to imag- 
ine you, at the last, when the great veil is being 
lifted, with your weazened, world-crusted soul, 
cringing into the dim outskirts of the presence 
of the Eternal." 

But however much the phrase echoed Car- 
lyle, the thought was Sill's own. So in the essay 
"Beardless," which also appeared in the "Yale 
Lit." at this time, there is an appeal for com- 
panionship and comprehension of younger men 
by their elders which influenced his own life 
consistently and was one of the secrets of his 
success as a teacher. 

" For it is certain that I at fifty will look back 
at me of to-day, quite contemptuously and 
pityingly; wondering how, knowing so little, we 
'get along' at all. O foolish future self! thou 




EDWARD R. SILL, 1861 



HIS LIFE AT COLLEGE 33 

has forgotten how much nobler-hearted, holier- 
souled thou was then than now. Thou art 
larger limbed now, stronger brained, yet thy 
boyhood had clearer eyes and purer faith, and 
was altogether, inwardly and outwardly, more 
as God meant man to be. Marred and soul- 
shrunken by the meanness and littleness of a 
man's daily life in the world, no wonder thou 
hast forgotten the vision of the morning, the 
dream of a life that should, for once, be crowned 
with completeness and with noble meaning. 
We can but pity one another after all, thou 
conquered by the world, I with the world be- 
fore me, unconquerable, and yet that must be 
met." 

His other undergraduate essays — "Fail- 
ure," a rather scathing analysis of current 
views of success, and "Vinum Daimonum," a 
defence of poetry, are in the customary vein of 
the young idealist. It goes without saying his 
poems were even more uncompromising in their 
morality and sombre in their tone. There is 
something perennially youthful in the solem- 
nity of the lines called "Midnight," and some- 
thing familiar in the note of sophomoric wis- 
dom and world-weariness : — 

"Under the stars, across whose patient eyes 
The wind is brushing flecks of filmy cloud, 
I wait for kindly night to hush and calm 
The wrangling throng of cares and discontents, 
The tangled troubles of a feverish brain. 



34 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

"I hear the rushing of the wings of Time 
Sweep by me. Voices of the murmuring Past 
Chant a low dirge above my kneeling heart." 

The university years over, Sill found himself 
in his twenty-first year undecided about his 
future, and quite undetermined about himself. 
His four years at New Haven had brought him 
friendships which he kept till he died, and a 
discovery of talents and possibilities in himself 
which he had not the slightest notion how to 
turn to account- His college mates and teach- 
ers thought him a poet — almost a genius, 
with a brilliant future: he knew himself for a 
youth — let us admit of some promise, but of 
slender resources and no clear course before 
him. He had plunged into his Sturm und Drang 
period, but had not yet emerged from it: he 
had reached the stage of revolt, but had not 
arrived at a fixed purpose; he had not found the 
cause or the career to which he could dedicate 
himself. Sprung from the stock of the Sills and 
the Rowlands, he could hardly help being an 
abolitionist, but abolitionism, which had fired 
many of the more sensitive souls at Harvard, 
had not blazed up at Yale. There was no such 
outbreak of patriotism in New Haven as at 
Cambridge. In Sill's " Commencement Poem," 
with all its spiritual ardor and aspiration, the 
only allusion to the war is merely scornful : — 
"What is the grandeur of serving a state, 



HIS LIFE AT COLLEGE 35 

whose tail is stinging its head to death like a 



scorpion 



Years were to pass before he found his place 
and work in the world, and the long period of 
wavering and uncertainty is chargeable not 
only to the man but to the environment. We 
have already glanced at the opposing strains, of 
minister and doctor, in his inheritance; we have 
noted the broken and scattered instruction of 
his boyhood, clouded by loss of brother, 
mother, and father; we have seen the singularly 
unsatisfactory atmosphere into which he en- 
tered at the university. We can hardly be sur- 
prised that he should pass out of the academic 
halls full of opposing ardors and dissonant 
impulses and aimless purposes. 



Ill 

THE VOYAGE 'ROUND THE HORN 

Sill spent part of the summer and autumn 
following his graduation in the beautiful old 
town of Windsor, Connecticut, where he was 
born. A scrap from a letter to a classmate indi- 
cates that he read poetry if he did not write 
any, and that his undergraduate love for 
Tennyson still held. 

"Have been noticing what different poets 
have said about the autumn leaves, as an 
example of Tennyson's infinite height above 
them all. You know how he talks: — 

"'Flying gold of autumn woodland — ' 

I "'This maple burn itself away — ' 

"'I laid a fiery finger on the leaves — ' etc., etc. 

"Other poets, ' brown and sere' — 'sere and 
yellow ' — et cetera, no bettera. 

"Been reading (and enjoying — tell it not in 
Gath) one John Milton's 'Paradise Lost'! I 
guess the judgment of generations is a pretty 
sure thing after all. 

"Great world as ever, is n't it? How about 
immortality? Much taught, or at all, in Old 
Testament? Am still wondering about that 



THE VOYAGE 'ROUND THE HORN 37 

book. Look at Job now — it is amazing — one 
or two thousand years before our era." 

In December he and his intimate friend 
Shearer set sail for California, 'round the Horn, 
a four months' voyage during which Sill kept a 
journal as most young men of literary tenden- 
cies have done on their first voyages. Some 
extracts may be saved from oblivion to indicate 
his half -formed tastes and his powers of obser- 
vation, but they are best prefaced by a letter 
written toward the end of the voyage to a 
classmate in New England : — 

Pacific Ocean, March 13, 1862. 

It is strange how quickly and completely all 
idea of danger evaporated. After the first fort- 
night, I never felt the slightest fear of ship- 
wreck or anything of that sort, any more than I 
should at home of the roof's falling in. Some- 
times there is a fearfulness — sometimes an 
awf ulness — about the sea — in the night, with 
the darkness, and the roar of the wind, and the 
black waves flashing out white fangs from their 
deep jaws, and the swift motion (seeming with 
the noise of the foam seething by, to fairly hiss 
through the water), and the ghostly sails tower- 
ing up, the mast-tips sweeping great arcs 
across the flying rags of cloud, their motion and 
great disproportionate size and height com- 
pared with the ship's narrow deck giving one 



38 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

such an impression of vast instability, and the 
utter desolateness of the position — cut off 
from all aid of man among the gigantic ener- 
gies of blind force — but it does n't inspire 
what can be called fear — such as you have 
towards a pistol or a falling brick — but a 
supernatural sort of awe — half cowing, and 
half rousing the tragic element in a man to a 
superhuman defiance. . . . 

I enjoyed life — lazy and purposeless as the 
life was. The only thing to mar the enjoyment 
of it was a restless idea that my mind was losing 
time. I thought with an envious feeling of you 
who have been using your brains ever since we 
graduated. A man can't keep in mind, some- 
how, that he has an eternity before him and 
need n't ever begrudge any time which is spent 
in the way of his duty. 

In your last letter you said you hoped I 
would write something, on this voyage. Well, 
so did I — but I hav.e n't. I could have, of 
course, by going at it as a task — but I think a 
person ought never to write poetry unless he 
wants to — unless he feels impelled to tell some- 
thing he has in him. If beautiful scenes should 
inspire thought or rouse deep feeling, I ought 
surely to have experienced it. Such starlight 
nights I never saw before — " larger constella- 
tions burning" — in the course of one night I 
saw all the stars of first magnitude (twenty in 



THE VOYAGE 'ROUND THE HORN 39 

all) except one, and sparkling through such a 
clear blue atmosphere as one does n't often see 
North. The dawn, too, is beautiful. Several 
times I have got up before it commenced, and, 
climbing to the highest yard on the mast, have 
sat there and watched the daybreak. With the 
short twilight of the latitude the west was all 
night-sky and the stars bright, while the east 
was morning, making delicious contrasts of 
colors. 

The strangest life it is — floating on over 
the desert, so utterly cut off from men and all 
men's doings. We don't care what the world 
does with itself. The war never enters our 
heads, except as a recollection of a thing we 
were interested in, in the past. The accident of 
being on the same planet with the rest of man- 
kind is nothing — any more than revolving in 
the same solar system gives you a lively interest 
in the social problems of Mars. 

The jottings from the journal are accom- 
panied by occasional footnotes of ironical com- 
ment eminently just and calculated to disarm 
the not too critical biographer. They were also 
accompanied in the original by marginal 
sketches in caricature of Sill, Shearer, mer- 
maids, fishes, albatrosses, et al., which unfortu- 
nately are not now available. 



40 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

Tuesday Evening, 24th Dec, 1861. 
Here, it is nine o'clock, almost a dead calm; 
the sea smooth and oily, seeming to be breath- 
ing in its sleep in long, slow swells which roll 
the ship lazily from stem to stern, and now and 
then from side to side. The sky overcast and 
preparing for rain with no promise of a breeze. 1 
We are prematurely in the Doldrums which 
have no business to cage us for several degrees 
yet. There was a marvelous sunset to-night, I 
can't describe it, words perhaps exist which 
would set it forth, but it is far out of my skill. 
The most beautiful west I ever saw. I climbed 
up the rigging and sat there until the glory had 
all gone. How sadly the change comes, from 
all the gorgeous gold and green and violet, the 
pure olive and lustrous silver, slowly, imper- 
ceptibly, into darkening green and then mere 
dusky masses of cloud and night. There it was 
so few moments ago, all light and joy and 
praises, now, while I sit in the same posture, 
not a limb changed, it is hopeless, loveless dark 
— "the set gray life, and apathetic end." 

Sat. Morning, Jan. 11. 
' Lat. 13.44 S. Long. 38.35. 

Yesterday afternoon I spent with my mi- 
croscope examining all manner of queernesses, 

1 It is a noticeable fact that our young man seems to dwell on 
the weather as persistently as a bashful girl at a party. As if it 
could be interesting to people months afterwards and hundreds 



THE VOYAGE 'ROUND THE HORN 41 

fished up in the bug-net — all sorts and varie- 
ties of "things forked and horned and soft," 
beautiful, curious, comical. Verily man inhabits 
not only two worlds — of matter and spirit — 
but three distinct material ones — that re- 
vealed by the telescope, that by the eyes, and 
that by the microscope, the last not least won- 
derful in its complexity of infinitesimal organs 
and brilliancy of color. Last night was a beau- 
tiful one * (how one needs to use that word here 
at sea). The moon nearly full, near the zenith, 
the air in which it swam of a pure liquid blue — 
dark and lustrous. Venus lower down, a drop 
of molten silver, and great bands and terraces 
of cirrus cloud slowly moving across the con- 
stellations, five bars of which, nearly overhead, 
were in the likeness of a great superhuman 
hand — such as might have belonged to the 
arm " clothed in white samite, mystic, wonder- 
ful " — on the third finger of which, as it floated 
up towards the moon, slipped the belt of Orion 
like a diamond ring. 

Monday, January 27. 
Lat. 45.27. Long. 59.20. 

I wish I could get into my log-book some 
picture of the beautiful faces the sea wears, 

of miles away. Such, however, is the amusing egotism of imma- 
ture travellers. 

1 Our ingenious tourist has the real school-girl knack of ad- 
jectives. The simple young fellow, we suppose, wants to have us 
see all the sights which pleased him, and as our language really 



42 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

changing from "gay, or grave, or sweet, or 
stem," as the days bring us different winds and 
climates. To-day it has one of the quiet, smil- 
ing looks — one of the many times when it 
seems more natural to make the sea feminine, 
to think and speak of it as the white-armed, 
blue-eyed Naiad, than as regal old hoary- 
bearded Neptune. It is calm as a lake; oily- 
smooth in some places, crinkled or lightly rip- 
pled in others. Off where the noonday sun is 
reflected, the surface has a green brilliancy, the 
color of a half-ripe orange, and all sparkling 
and crinkling, as molten silver might with a 
crust of diamonds. Before breakfast I climbed 
to the to'gallant yard and sat astride of it; it 
was all beauty wherever eye could rest, or ear 
listen. We were gliding along imperceptibly 
unless you saw the bubbles pass astern, two or 
three knots an hour, the soft cool air right 
astern, through belts of a few hundred yards' 
breadth of alternately smooth and roughened 
water. When we were passing through a 
smooth one all was perfectly hushed near the 
ship, and it was pleasant to listen to the mur- 
mur of the ripples and little waves washing to 
and fro in the rougher places farther from us, a 
low, strange noise like the sough of winds in 
pine woods. I could shut my eyes up aloft there 

is lacking in synonyms, let us be charitable while he strums away 
on his one little descriptive string. 



THE VOYAGE 'ROUND THE HORN 43 

and imagine myself in the deep woods with the 
wind far off and near, making that pleasant 
whispering, minor music, and the water plash- 
ing about the rudder like the noise of a brook 
heard near at hand. 

I believe I have never spoken of there being 
always a plashing and swishing and hissing and 
dashing and rushing noise about the ship in 
ordinary weather; varying, of course, from 
pleasant murmurs to loud and fierce tones. It 
is never perfectly still except in dead calm. 
Waves little or big are incessantly breaking, 
rippling and tumbling, near and far, with that 
same indefinable, vague intermingling of vari- 
ous tones, which one hears lying within sound 
of the surf on a sea-beach. 

Thursday, the 7th Feb. 
Lat. 26. Long. 103. 9§ morning. 

My day began this morning with the dawn, 
as all days ought to — not the withered and 
tarnished thing which people generally are 
willing to accept for it, but the real dawn. Got 
up at eight bells (four o'clock), stuck my head 
out of the window and found it clear, the faint- 
est possible tinge of light on the southeastern 
horizon already. Traced out the constellations 
with map at the binnacle light, then climbed to 
the royal-yard (highest yard on mast) and 
settled myself across it with my arms around 



44 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

the slender mast. Some of the old familiar 
Northern stars were now visible again, Alpha 
Lyrse, glittering white as of old, the Eagle and 
the little Dolphin, Arcturus off over the main- 
mast, and directly overhead the beautiful 
Scorpion. Besides, were all the brightest of 
Southern splendors, the Cross and Centaur 
sinking in the southwest, and Jupiter, hanging 
large and white upon the dark west like a liquid 
pearl. By the time all the stars had been recog- 
nized an arch of faint light had risen in the east. 
Each time I returned to it from the stars it had 
risen rapidly higher and brighter. Suddenly 
from behind a low cloud along the horizon 
appeared the old moon, a mere crescent thread 
of pearl (for to-morrow it is new moon), more 
slender than one ever sees it in the long twilight 
of our latitude. The next time I looked at the 
east a faintly visible film of soft cirrus, unseen 
before, was rippled up the clear sky in broad, 
radiating streaks, wimpled across like thin 
cream when disturbed. All along the western 
horizon lay rounded cumuli, some floating up 
and spread over at the top like white smoke, as 
from a volcano, risen in a still air, others tower- 
ing like overhanging icebergs, capped with 
snow, others, in likeness of great countenances 
— like Greek tragic-masks — earnest or terri- 
fied faces motionless under some spell of horror. 
In the east the clouds piled along the horizon 



THE VOYAGE 'ROUND THE HORN 45 

seemed pressing forward, standing on tiptoe to 
peer over each other's shoulders, watching for 
the expected sun. Already they are tipped and 
edged with red light, one or two floating alone 
all luminous from within apparently with scar- 
let. Off in the southwest rise Andes peaks, their 
tops roseate over the dark bars of stratus drawn 
across their sides and bases, while the " icebergs " 
in the west are become smouldering coals with 
the red heat glowing through their coating of 
white ash. Now the cloudy threshold of the 
east is burning gold — and at last up the sky 
flame the broadening rays, firing shaft upon 
shaft of the clouds around, and burning 
through the low cloud wall in broken rifts, 
rises the dazzling sun. The stars have been fast 
melting away into the brightening blue — 
Alpha Lyrse, only a few minutes before the 
sun appeared, flickered out, a white, glittering 
point, then Alpha Centauri was lost, and last of 
all Jupiter can no longer be found. It was full 
day, — the water blue and sparkling in the 
light breeze, — so I climbed to the ' ' truck " (the 
round ball on top of the mast), "shinning it" 
from the yard, hung my hat upon it in triumph, 
slid back to the yard and standing upon it 
horrified my chum (who had just come on deck 
down below me) by waving my hat to him, then 
descended. In the evening and morning of the 
same night I had seen all the stars of first 



46 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

magnitude, except one, viz: the Southern Fish 

— fourteen were visible at one time, in the 

evening. 

Sunday, Feb. 23. 
Lat. 32. Long. 78. 

8§ o'clock, morning. I am almost ready 
to believe that on the ocean, at least, where 
man's wickedness has had least influence, Na- 
ture keeps Sabbath: air and water and sky are 
so bright and peaceful. Last night, for the first 
time in several weeks, we had a cloudless sky, 
except low down about the horizon. Right 
astern were the Cross and its companion glories, 
scattered down the Milky Way, diamonds and 
rubies in mosaic on a pearl-dusted ground of 
dark blue. Overhead was glazing Sirius, white- 
hot, and south of him the next brightest star 
in the heavens, Canopus. In the west through 
the spaces of the sails sparkled Orion and the 
Bull, while the Pleiades were just going down 
into the cloudy circle of the horizon. Round the 
edge of the mainsail shone the Lesser Dog, 
and the Twins. In the east hung the Sickle, 
and mid-way between it and red Spica Virginis 
burned Jupiter, preternaturally splendid, send- 
ing a track across the water like a moonrise. 
Just under the Cross a black hole opened 
through the stars out into the fathomless dark- 
ness — the larger "Coal Sack" — nearly cir- 
cular, six degrees in diameter. The other side 



THE VOYAGE 'ROUND THE HORN 47 

of the South Pole Stars lay the Megellanic 

Clouds — like bits of hazy cirrus a little larger 

than Orion's Square. 

Tuesday, Feb. 25. 
Lat. 28, S. Long. 101. 

I have been struck with the resemblance 
between our ship and society. We are a per- 
fect little microcosm, one little crystal cut out 
of the great crystal, perfect in shape and an 
exact counterpart of the whole from which it 
was taken. Forward, in the crowded, uncleanly 
forecastle, separated from all direct association 
with the occupants of the cabin, aft, are the 
common sailors (the laboring masses, ignorant 
and brawny). Next amidships is the galley 
with its cook and steward, the providers (far- 
mers and merchants). Next, inhabiting the 
forward end of the house, the three mates, giv- 
ing the orders of the Captain to the men (the 
professional men, teaching and seeing to the 
execution of the principles of the few leading 
minds, among the masses). Then in the cabin 
two sorts of passengers — equally unconnected 
with the working or guidance of the ship from 
day to day — the rich youngster, travelling to 
kill time (the gentry in ennui and kid gloves), 
and the scientific person, microscope or tele- 
scope in hand, regardless of the wind so it 
doesn't cloud his stars (the Galileo, etc., careless 
of politics and working for the Future). Last 



48 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

of all, with the Wheel for will and the Compass 
for conscience, and the Chart for Bible, stands 
the Captain (the great thinker, here and there 
standing alone, comprehending and directing 
the whole mechanism of society). 

Afternoon — One o'clock. 

I have been lounging up in the top this fore- 
noon (a very comfortable, secluded roost). The 
ocean fairly persecutes me with its clamorous 
demands to be expressed in words. I become an 
"Ancient Mariner," whose "Wedding Guest" 
is my journal, having no peace till I get what is 
before me expressed. What a difference there 
is between the writing of a man who is trying 
to say handsome things, and that of him who 
is impelled by an instinctive desire to "get it 
expressed" as I have called it. Yet the latter 
gets all the discredit of the former with the mass 
of readers. Maury and Ruskin are pretty good 
examples. It is perfectly evident (in Phys. 
Geog. Sea) that the flowery Lieutenant is only 
describing Nature because it ornaments his 
book; instead of trying to paint accurately 
things as they are, he is stringing pretty words 
together. Ruskin, on the contrary, is evidently 
struggling with the scene before him, to im- 
prison the beauty in words — not struggling 
either, for that conveys an idea of some dubi- 
ousness, in the attempt, as to its success — say 
rather is earnestly and swiftly painting it there 



THE VOYAGE 'ROUND THE HORN 49 

for you, unable in his enthusiasm to pause or 
rest till it is done, and you see it all as he saw 
it. For instance, on page 129, Maury says of the 
Southern sky, "Canopus and Sirius, etc., etc. 
are high up in their course; they look down with 
great splendor, smiling peacefully as they pre- 
cede the Southern Cross on its western way." 
Now I consider it impossible that any sane man 
should have had those two incongruous im- 
pressions upon his mind from the same stars at 
any one time — consequently he must be 
shamming one of them. Undoubtedly the truth 
is, he thinks the "smiling" idea (suggested by 
some rhymer) will sound rather well, and so 
he says it. 1 I was going to speak, when my 
critical streak came over me, about the sound 
of the water as I leaned back in the " top " and 
listened to it. It seemed compounded of the 
whispers of pine woods, the washing of small 
waves against the bow of a rowboat, the hollow 
murmur of a shell, the babbling of a little hid- 
den brook in the woods, and the wind brushing 
and bending the trees. With a fresher breeze 
it is the noise of Big Falls heard from halfway 
down the hill. Then there is the low fluttering 
sound which the wind makes against the ear, 

1 Our pretentious young wanderer is really going it rather 
strong. "That's the bungling way Maury does, you know, now 
see how nice / can do it!" Let us hope, however, that he is not 
such a humbug as he seems — perhaps the young fellow is really 
honest in what he says, after all. 



50 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

always mingled with rest. Nature tries hard 
to satisfy us with her music — like some In- 
dian woman, bending over the little white cap- 
tive which the warriors have stolen and brought 
to her, trying to make it understand her simple 
lullabies. But it is in vain — the sounds are 
all musical, yet there is no human meaning in 
it. We turn away from the wind and the wave, 
longing for some old song that has linked the 
voices of a friendly circle, some tune that has 
borne a meaning to us separate from the mere 
notes, as the expression of human fellowship 
and affection. Yet, if it had been safe, I could 
have gone to sleep very easily there in the top, 
with my head resting on my arm, lulled by the 
waves, looking off through half -shut eyes on 
blue water, flecked with white foam, under 
blue sky, islanded with fleecy, pearl-colored 
cloud, and with the song of the Lotus-eaters 
singing itself in my head. It is the most delight- 
ful sailing, this, that I can imagine. Sails all 
set, " wings " and all, just kept full and mo- 
tionless all the time, wind hardly perceptible, 
no rollers, beautiful sky and water, soft, warm 
air, and going on, night and day, about six 
miles an hour, with only enough gentle rocking, 
slowly, now and then, to seem the embodiment 
of idleness and calm. 



IV 

CALIFORNIA 

The five years that Sill now spent in Cali- 
fornia were true Wanderjahre, for though when 
the episode closed he was still uncertain of his 
vocation, the range of choice had narrowed to 
teaching, or the alternative, preaching. The 
years were filled with restless activity. For a 
time he worked in the post-office at Sacramento; 
some months he spent on a ranch; some months 
at studying law ; for a time he looked about for 
a school to teach; perhaps the longest interval 
was given to "clerking" in a bank at Folsom. 
None of these occupations satisfied his mind or 
allayed his discontent. The strangeness of the 
place contributed to his restless feeling : at first 
he seems to have suffered from something like 
homesickness, and he evidently disliked Cali- 
fornia, or thought he did, very cordially. The 
mood passed and the time came when he could 
sing her praises as fervently as any native, 
though one may permit one's self the mental 
reservation that the praise may have been for 
the outward California and that the Puritan 
never became spiritually acclimated. 



5% EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

"Well," he writes, in March, 1862, "as I 
said, we got in last week — were disappointed 
in California's first appearance. Swore an oath, 
at the expiration of the first day's travelling 
around San Francisco, not to make ' this people 
our people nor their God our God ' — for their 
God is money. Yet I have liked it better every 
day, so far — but could not live here long — 
no culture, no thought, no art. My town here 
(as I call it in distinction from S.'s town, San 
F.) is at present a dismantled wreck, by the 
floods of the winter — people still go about in 
boats instead of buggies. It 's a sort of muddy 
Venice, with little wooden houses instead of the 
'Palace and the Prison on either hand.' ' 

Six months later he was still "very tired of 
California and indeed sick at heart of such peo- 
ple and such circumstances as surround me 
here," which he refers to again the same month 
as "out here in heathendom." Nor had he 
softened toward the golden West when the year 
had rolled round. "I refuse to consider myself 
anything but a pilgrim and a stranger. I don't 
like the country any better than when I wrote 
before, but I presume I shall think it best to 
stay here till next spring when I shall hope to 
depart. . . . For to my taste the ups and downs, 
summer and winter, snow and flowers, rain and 
then sunshine of the weather East, are much 



CALIFOENIA 53 

pleasanter than the monotonous fairness of the 
skies here." 

"To tell the truth," he writes to a classmate 
in the spring of 1863, "I have had the Devil's 
own time out here in some respects. I don't 
nave any feeling of having been treated un- 
justly, or that my fate has been hard at all, for 
it has n't. I have the common sense, I hope, to 
perceive that the trouble has been with me, not 
with circumstances." It is only a youthful 
growl, after all, and explained in part by a 
line from another letter, — "Half the weari- 
ness of my life here consists of its terrible iso- 
lation." 

To California's physical charm he could 
never, of course, be indifferent. It grew upon 
him. After two years in Sacramento he was 
writing in this strain: — 

" California (so far as that means the natural 
and not the human aspect thereof) is inexpres- 
sibly beautiful just now. The trees are all just 
'out,' in their spring vesture — the fields full 
of flowers — nobody has any right to talk about 
fields carpeted with flowers till he has seen 
them here (or, I suppose, in the still more trop- 
ical climates). Great gorgeous fellows, you 
know — like all the conservatories you ever 
saw broken loose and romping over the wild 
plains here, exulting and irrepressible. And not 
only these superb sorts, but come to stoop down 



54 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

and look closer you find multitudes of the least 
wee blossoms — little stars, scarcely bigger than 
a pin's head, blue, and pure white, perfect as 
gems — only so for a couple of months or three 
months — then the parching, rainless summer 
bakes the ground, and browns the dry grass to 
a monotonous tint that makes one hot and 
thirsty even to look at it. 

"And as with the vegetation, so with the 
children born here. . . . Little human blossoms, 
such as one rarely sees in the cold, Atlantic 
States. Mites of girls, with complexions like 
porcelain which you look at the light through 
— and soft, beautiful eyes. And little boys, 
fair and delicate as girls — bright and gentle, 
but so fragile-looking that it seems as though 
to speak suddenly to them would shock them 
out of existence. They come around to my 
post-office windows, toddling bits of creatures, 
asking for letters as sedate and grave as old 
men — and trotting off with them in their little 
hands, the letter almost as big as the sprite that 
carries it. Whereat the clerk, Sill, pokes his 
head contemptuously through the window, and 
marvels at the climate which produces such 
things." 

The California years were Wanderjahre, no 
less of the mind than of the body, and of the 
spirit perhaps even more than the mind — 
years of all manner of seeking, questioning. 



CALIFORNIA 55 

trying of experiments and searchings of the 
soul. Every profession and some trades he 
chose and discarded, only to leave the matter 
unsettled at the end. His first leadings, cu- 
riously and naturally enough, were toward 
teaching. While he was still on shipboard he 
wrote his friend Dexter, "If possible I shall col- 
lect some children who don't know anything 
and follow your pedagogal footsteps." And 
shortly after reaching Sacramento, he wrote, 
**No place here for schoolteachers. Unless one 
could teach them how to make money fast. 
Nobody would send their children." Before 
the summer was over he was dipping into 
Blackstone: — 

July, 1862. 
As for me, I have come to it finally, like 
all the rest of 'em — I am to study law. And 
what a lawyer I shall make ! I suppose I am one 
of the first, though, who ever determined on 
that profession for the benefit it would be to 
himself spiritually. Yet that's my crotchet. 
We are (some people don't seem to be — but 
you and I and a few of us certainly are) planted 
down in the midst of a great snarl and tangle of 
interrogation points. We want to find — we 
must find — some fixed truth. Either we are 
wrong and the vast majority of thinkers right, 
or they are wrong and we right — and that, 



56 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

too, not on one point, but a thousand — points 
of the vastest scope and importance. As Kings- 
ley puts it, we are set down before that greatest 
world-problem — " Given self, to find God." 
So, considering that for such tasks the mind 
needs every preparation, skill and practice in 
drawing close distinctions, subtileness in de- 
tecting sophistry, strength and patience to 
work at a train of thought continuously long 
enough to follow its consequences clear out, and 
some systematized memory (if for nothing but 
holding and duly furnishing your own thoughts 
when needed) — I say, seeing no better — or 
rather, no other — way to gain these but by 
entering the law, thitherwards I have set my 
face. ... I have sifted it all down to this con- 
clusion — that in teaching, or in literature, or 
even in following up some chosen science (much 
less some chosen art, as poetry), the mind would 
not get fitted for that serious work which is 
before it. In them, it might become cultivated, 
stored with knowledge, in some sense developed 
— but not disciplined. Now just take that 
question alone — Is Christianity true? What 
impudence it would be in us to consider that 
settled in the negative, until we felt that our 
intellects were as strong, as capable of close, 
protracted reasoning, as little liable to be misled 
by sophistry, as all those greatest men who 
have time after time settled it for themselves 



CALIFORNIA 57 

in the affirmative. I for my part can see no 
way in which I can at the same time earn a 
living, and get the active powers of my mind 
thoroughly disciplined, except by studying 
law. . . . 

The law loosened its hold. In November he 
writes: — 

" September and October I spent for the most 
part on a ranch, as they call their farms out 
here. It was a large stock ranch, over west of 
here some fifty miles in the Coast Range Moun- 
tains. . . . There are about 150 horses and 400 
or 500 cattle running wild over a tract of some 
ten miles long and two or three wide — en- 
tirely unfenced, the only limit to their grazing 
being the necessity of going to a little creek for 
water and the inaccessible steeps and ravines 
of the surrounding hills. 

"My principal employment was taking care 
of horses and riding horseback after the wild 
cattle, from dawn to bedtime. It was fatiguing 
work at first, but I got so that I rode my fifty 
miles between breakfast and supper without 
difficulty." 

And before the end of the month, — "I have 
been trying to teach school out here, but not 
yet have succeeded in finding a situation." 

By [the next summer he had shut the law- 
books for good: — y 



58 EDWAKD ROWLAND SILL 

Sacramento, Cal., Aug. 6, 1863. 
— Vocation. That is still the great vexa- 
tion with us. What was I born to do? Two 
little goblins [a jocular allusion to himself and 
Shearer] running distractedly up and down, 
wringing their hands, with "What was I made 
for?" — till big Death comes out on them with 
a great laughing, "Ho! ho! ho! ho! To die!" 
and sweeps them out of the way. I'll tell you 
first about myself. ... I am not going to study 
law. I am getting slowly proficient in short- 
hand, as a trade to rely on, and earning what 
I can as a post-office clerk. For the present 
I shall stay in P. O. All I ask is, to be sup- 
ported, with a little leisure for study. The 
more, the better. And with a hope of laying 
up such an amount from year to year as shall 
make the leisure grow longer, and the neces- 
sity for labor (mechanical) less imperious, how- 
ever slowly, as I grow older. My constitution 
and frame forbid me to suppose that I shall 
live many years, so I am the less exercised in 
mind about hopes, plans, or fears, for any dis- 
tant future. . . . 

It is fortunately not necessary to take Sill, 
mtat 22, very seriously on the subject of his 
health; on that topic he was for a short time 
rather imaginative. The next phase of the 
"vocation" problem may nevertheless have 



CALIFORNIA 59 

been affected by this attack of interest in his 
health. In February, 1864, he writes: "I am 
trying to study medicine (you remember sug- 
gesting it to me once) and my only familiar 
acquaintance made here is a doctor who gives 
me the use of his books, office, and experience 
for the few hours which I can save from my 
day's work. I can lay a few of the foundation 
stones here to be built upon (next year when 
I come East) in the lecture and dissecting 
room." 

This phase while it lasted was acute. "Next 
spring, 1865," he writes again, "I mean to 
come back with sound health, large pectoral 
muscles, a little elementary knowledge of medi- 
cine, and about $500 in jolly greenbacks. . . ." 
But there were other turns of Fortune's wheel. 
A month later he writes of a change which 
apparently put an end to the study of medicine. 

Mch., '64. 
Next month I am going to "move" — shall 
quit the post-office, and go up to a little town 
some twenty miles north of Sacramento — 
Folsom (Foolsom — in the barbarous dialect 
of the natives here — I don't know but the 
name is a fearful augury of my wisdom in going 
there). Goes I there into a bank — changing 
my delightful employment of peddling postage 
stamps (stomps — they call 'em here) for that 



60 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

of buying gold dust from Mexicans, Digger 
Indians, and Chinamen, who are all great at 
the "surface-mining" in that vicinity. 

The year which he now spent at Folsom was 
attended with somewhat less discomfort and 
discontent than the preceding period. He had 
the good fortune to find as chief Mr. C. T. H. 
Palmer, himself a graduate of Yale and a lover 
— even a practitioner in a modest fashion —of 
literature, with whom Sill established a friend- 
ship that lasted the rest of his life. Fragmen- 
tary notes to classmates give the setting i — 

Folsom, May 23, 1864. 
I am established here. It is a little, insignifi- 
cant town, but one very pleasant household, in 
which I am fortunate enough to be. It is one of 
these little scooped-out holes among the foot- 
hills (the prefaces to the Sierras), with fever 
and ague rampant, and hotter than any hot 
road in Litchfield County. I am learning to 
keep bank books, which I hate, and manage an 
express agency, which I don't like, and to buy 
gold dust, assay dust for gold, which is n't 
quite so bad, and to be decently genial and 
human, which is excellent for me. 

Folsom, Cal., June 15, 1864. 
The beauty of my position now is that I am 
among a very few very fine people, i.e., about 



CALIFORNIA 61 

three or four. We constituting an oasis in the 
usual horrid description of desert made up of 
"Pike's, fools, fools, fools, and other fools." 
Business, as you know, I do not mightily enjoy. 
And here I am, confined to the office from 6| 
mornings to ditto ditto at night. The evening 
only, being hallowed and glorified by a piano, 
a good little library, and the conversation of 
people who et illi in Arcadia — i.e., have been 
to Yale (the caput familias at least has) or 
caught its spirit hereditarily. My chief, C. T. 
H. Palmer, supported himself through Yale 
(Class '47) (at least the spreeing part of his 
support, quod maximum) by writing for Mags, 
etc., and to this day is a Poick. His wife is a 
granddaughter of Prex. Day's and her brother 
is a worthy scion of the stock. 

My little town here is an oven, cheerfully 
planted with " shakes " and other bilious fevers. 
The Chinese portion of the population form its 
most industrious and respectable class, and 
employ themselves in mining and looking gen- 
erally absurd and Mongolian in* their persistent 
Chinese rig (which I adopt so far as shoes are 
concerned to scuff around in, indoors). The 
American element loafs around whiskey shops, 
burns its vitals out with hellish brandy, until 
fever and shakes settle them quietly into the 
graveyard. Of course there are a few respect- 
able, good, vulgar people, who keep up a Sun- 



62 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

day School, make a sparse gathering of audi- 
ence around the empty church Sundays, and 
try to build up a new New England out here, 
as eventually will be succeeded in, all over 
California. 

There is one thing of my [circumstances 
here which you will rejoice mecum at — I am 
no longer wholly divorced from music. I play 
the little hewgag in the church and get bites 
and sips at other music from the piano. I sup- 
pose you have never known so complete a 
starvation from music as I have endured the 
last two years until now. Next to losing all 
love, it seems to me the greatest privation man 
is capable of suffering. 

The change of place and of occupation gave a 
new direction to Sill's thoughts. The year 1864 
was a time of emotional and spiritual unrest 
more acute than he had known before. 

"My dear friend," he writes to a classmate, 
in March of that year, "... your letter pulled 
upon my very inwards, and I want to sort of ex- 
plain to you why I do not answer it by packing 
my trunk with my three least ragged shirts and 
my Tennyson, and getting into a mailbag myself 
and coming on. I do really believe I catch my- 
self heartily wishing I was installed in that asst. 
librarianship, and chumming tecum in fair old 
New Haven. Yet to go on there immediately 



CALIFORNIA 63 

would be in some sense a cowardly backing out. 
It would be facing the world and then running 
away; in taking up arms against a sea of 
trouble, and having them beautifully broken 
over my head. If I were a scholar, if I had been 
a faithful student in college instead of a hair- 
brained ass, I should desire no greater fortune 
than to be, as you are (I rejoice to learn — 
gratulor tibi — consider yourself gripped), con- 
nected with Yale. It has been mainly my sense 
of incapacity that has prevented my continuing 
in my first plan of teaching — which I intended 
to have followed till it led me to some such 
path. 

"As it is, I have taken to clerkships, ano^ 
shall depend on such husks, to support me till I 
can learn (if ever) to be in some higher capacity 
useful. Yet I do not now intend to stay here 
longer than one more year. It is as you say a 
gross, deadening place. I abominate it, from 
first to last. Next spring, 1865, Sex [Shearer] 
and I mean to come home. What to do there I 
can form no guess. Not to starve I am sure, 
and not become pedlars I hope. You say you 
* don't know how high my ambition is ' — in my 
present circumstances and mood, and beliefs, 
it sounded like a sort of sarcasm. If 'Brutus 
says ' I ' was ambitious,' I suppose I must admit 
it. I believe I thought more highly of myself 
than I ought to think, in college, even in those 



64 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

last, self-questioning days. But I believe I 
have got out from under that egotistical night- 
mare, never, I hope, to be ridden with it again. 
I only ask of the Fates now, to give me knowl- 
edge and to make me be, in some way, really 
useful. . . ," 

And in June: "No time to write now — I'm 
standing at my desk, with the appurtenances of 
business hanging around me, like the shackles 
on a demd slave, the pen only caught from be- 
hind its accustomed nook, the ear, for a mere 
parenthesis of talk with you. I think if I could 
get away from counters and desks, into the 
woods somewhere, after my last three years' 
experience, I would be glad to do it — I wonder 
if somewhere in Maine there is not a cabin, de- 
serted of its last hermit, under some big trees, 
with a cliff hanging over it, and a stream to 
catch one's daily meat out of — if so, it was 
built for me." 

In August he was still strenuous — and still 
groping — but turning now toward theology ; 
for matters of faith had laid hold of him — 
matters which were to engage his attention for 
the next three years : — 

"I am working very hard just' now — at 
what (I never can shake off the feeling — the 
conviction) is unprofitable labor — mere busi- 
ness. 

"How much weariness, etc., one can stand, 



CALIFORNIA 65 

though, when it is known to be for a limited 
time. . . . Have n't you often been newly star- 
tled at the sudden realization of how much 
man owes to Hope? 

"My great comfort is that man can't take 
his learning or his culture out of this life with 
him — Death pushes back everything from the 
gate except the naked soul. — Hence it don't 
much matter that one can't study, and know 
this or that. 

"... I 've been reading theology lately. — 
You spoke of the legion of things which claim 
our attention — verily, verily. But moral 
philosophy stands first — then metaphysics — 
then down, to medicine, literature, sociology, 
kakology, history, etc. — I keep a little foun- 
tain babbling and plashing in my brain, by 
reading, nearly every day, a word of Tenny- 
son or Browning (Mrs. I mean) or Ruskin or 
Bible or somebody — I would like to take your 
arm and start on a trip through moral phil- 
osophy, by evenings. . . . 

" I want to learn the organ when I come East. 
What will it cost me, besides time? It is in me 
if I do not get too old before it can come out." 

It was during his residence at Folsom in '64 
and '65 that the love affair which caused some 
of his friends anxiety waxed and waned. There 
is no doubt that Sill was sincere and that he be- 



66 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

lieved himself to be seriously in love, but it may 
be doubted whether it was not a "false dawn," 
lighted by sympathy and intensified by his 
loneliness. The first allusion to his state of 
mind occurs in a letter to a classmate in New 
Haven : — 

"My boy, have you, of late, had much 
thought about the domestic question (domus, a 
home) ? — I know you have, more or less, pon- 
dered it. Have you in your Sittings happened 
upon any touches or hints of it, so as to bring it 
up vividly, as a matter of contrast? — That 
have I — and the chief end of man seems to lie 
in there somewhere. The question is, shall a 
man balk — - shall he refuse to be coddled, and 
pull back, and snap at the good angels, and say 
he won't have anything except bare life unless 
they'll explain it all to us, in which we have 
the sour satisfaction of not being fooled and 
amused. Or shall he enter the game cheerfully 
— content, if it's blindman's buff, to be blind- 
fold — take his share of the burdens and bless- 
ings — have wife and love — praise God 
gratefully for sunshine and trustfully for 
storms — and die with * thy will be done ! ' . . . 
Do you read Spencer and Renan? — I sort o' 
shrink from these loud fellows, who claim to 
tell it all. Yet I presume it's our duty to hear 
what they say. Have n't yet. I feel a prefer- 
ence in me to look over what little general his- 



CALIFORNIA 67 

tory I have (in mind) and blink a little at the 
old stars and think it over for myself — don't 
you? 

"Sometimes, after some peculiar blessing 
from the good thought angels, after some soli- 
tary walk at night, I seem to get calmer and 
better views, and to feel these fellows to be all 
flippant and inadequate. . . ." 

To one person only did Sill write at any 
length of the love passage, and these letters 
contain the entire conjugation, amo, amabo, 
amavi. 

Folsom, Cal., March 20, 1865. 

To-morrow comes a steamer mail and I 
hope a letter from you. But to-morrow also 
goes a steamer mail and I want to get a letter 
off, so I can't wait. I 've got a thing to ask ad- 
vice about, so to business fustly. Here is a girl 
twenty years old, with good brains, and uncon- 
querable will, who is bent on finishing (that is, 
getting, to our classic understanding) her educa- 
tion. She is teaching school and saving up her 
little earnings to go to Normal School at San 
Francisco after her present term's engagement 
is out. Of course you don't need to be told that 
any school in San Fran — is a humbug — a 
bilk — She has got to go East, now, where 
shall she go? I'm slightly inclined to Mount 
Holyoke. Knowest aught of that institution? 



68 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

And what is it about some big female college or 
other which Dr. Cox has somewhere in New 
York State? I thought of Holyoke because I 
know it is not costly, and the girl has only a 
little — six or seven hundred dollars, perhaps 

— to devote to it. Give to me your opinion as 
to where that little could be most advantage- 
ously spent by a girl who does n't want French 
or piano or painting or elegancies, so much as 
solid "male" education — such as we wanted, 
and want. Ask anybody you know who is 
"up" on these matters, and please send me 
immediately your opinion. Having said thus 
much, from a business point of view, it will per- 
haps be unnecessary to add that I love said 
girl and that she loves me, — which renders 
my little question a very important one to me, 

— where shall my little girl go to make herself 
what she wants to be before she will hear of 
marriage. Now, don't tell me anything about 
expensive places, for we won't hear a word of 
it. There is and can be and shall be (for the 
present) only so much in the purse — where 
will it buy the most of what we want? 

Now, dear H , I have n't time to tell 

you about my having fallen in love — you '11 be 
very glad to hear of it I know — and you may 
not be displeased to learn that you're the only 
friend east of California who has been told it. 
I would n't say anything to anybody, 'cause 



CALIFORNIA 69 

I don't want to have 'em write me nonsense 
about it. And please say naught to any one of 
what I have asked you about, and why. Some 
of these days I '11 sit down and relate my little 
story, for your and F.'s amusement. 

I don't know what I am going to do. Sex 
and I are hobnobbing over the question of 
ways and means, but what it weighs, and what 
it means, we don't know yet. No time now. 
Hope I'll hear from you to-morrow. Answer 
this as soon as you can. 

Yours ever 

Ed. R. Sill. 

I have n't written to any one but you about 
my conjugation of amo — amat, and shan't at 
present. 

Love to the Beloved — ask her if I shall 
send my dove to her for a friend if she goes 
East? 

Folsom, Cal., June 13, 1865. 
My very dear Friend — ... In the first 
place my little girl will very likely never be 
my wife, — for a number of complicated rea- 
sons which I can't tell in a letter. Even if we 
were certain of marrying sometime, we could 
not do so for two years at least. We have no 
money and no sufficient health. And a person 
of weak physique cannot marry without 
money, as you can easily see. Wherefore the 



70 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

plan which you so eloquently urge of being 
myself the teacher, and the fellow pupil at 
the same time, is impossible for us. You 
have given me a number of new ideas about 
this troublesome subject, and a great deal to 
think about. I believe you are right in the 
main, only it is obvious that the plan, in its 
minutiae, is only applicable to persons, either of 
strong constitutions or some means of support 
besides daily and wearying work. I was dis- 
appointed at your low estimates of the large 
schools there, but I still think they must be 

better than the schools in this country. 's 

mother insists upon her staying in California; I 
insist that she had better go to New England. 
How the matter will end I cannot foresee. I am 
in great trouble and perplexity about her affairs 
and my own. I think in the course of the fall 
shall be with the Shears on a ship aiming 
around the Horn. 

I expect you to keep my confidence in your 
own (and your wife's, of course,) heart. I tell 
no one else on that side of the ocean. I am 
blue and bothered by various perplexing things, 
and can't write more than this note, for this 
steamer. 

.... I really think that Shears and I shall 
be on the ocean by September, and perhaps 
before. I am tired — I want the long rest of 
the sea. 



CALIFORNIA 71 

San Francisco, Cal., Aug. 6, 1865. 

I have been running from sickness for the 
last month and a half. The malaria caught 
me, at Folsom, and hit hard. Came down here 
and the sea breezes have put life into me again. 
This week (this is the first day of it) I shall go 
back to my work. I don't think I am fond of 

work, H , are you? Oats and dignity is 

much preferable. 

People think that a thinking man's specu- 
lations about religion, etc., interfere with his 
daily life very little, but how certain conclu- 
sions do take the spine out of one's existence. 
These Spencer chaps may be very excellent, 
but to me there is an Apple of Sodom smack 
about it all. Little pigmies. What kind of 
babbling is this for worm-meat to emit? " For 
man" (not even with a capital M) "is not 
as God " — and I more than suspect that the 
said worms lick their chops over the brain, as 
over the coarser tidbits of the grave. 

Upon the mood into which he now entered 
several earlier letters throw a good deal of 
light, letters which recall undergraduate dis- 
putations but which also reveal the earnest 
religious disposition which Sill never lost. 

"It is strange," he writes to his friend Dex- 
ter, "how the weaker and lesser thing has 
power with us, simply through its nearness, 



72 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

to overcome the greater and higher — i.e., 
how troubles of earth conquer the faith and 
hope of the larger world, as the flimsy clouds 
by being so near us overcome the stars. I won- 
der if the great souls of old times did not some- 
how draw and clasp close to them the unseen 
realities, so that they gained such victory over 
present and visible matters. Tennyson says, 
* Oh, well for him whose will is strong ! ' I would 
substitute 'faith' for 'will.' The will is an iron 
heel to crush down the casual obstacles of the 
path, but faith is a clinging hand, reaching far 
upward and holding by the hand of God. I 
suppose to all of us who have stepped from 
college into the actual world, all things have 
become more earnest in the past year. It would 
be strange if each of us had not thought more 
seriously of 'things beyond,' as well as of things 
here in reference to them. Every one seems to 
have been suffering some peculiar trouble. 
You say, and I am very glad for you, that you 
have gained some clearer views. I do not know 
that I can say that for myself. I have smitten 
down some errors and vanities, perhaps; — it 
required little skill to do that — I had but to 
walk into my mental underbrush anywhere, 
and cut and slash right and left. I could pull 
tares indiscriminately with no danger of up- 
rooting any wheat — for there was but little 
in the field. I wish I had more faith in men, as 



CALIFORNIA 73 

well as in God. Out of all the human beings I 
ever saw, or heard of, if it were not for the very 
few, scattered here and there one, in history 
and the present, I should be utterly hopeless of 
man and his world. I have at times dragged 
anchor and drifted almost out of sight of my 
belief in immortality, just from a murky con- 
sideration of the question, What is there in 
man worth perpetuation? Why should a mean 
little pleasure-seeker like him be crystallized 
into immortality? Why should not the abused 
elements scatter and recombine into higher 
forms? But then I cry, 'Get thee behind me, 
Satan,' and grope for the guiding hand." 

Sacramento, Aug. 6, '63. 

I have had some queer things going on in 
my inner man, since I saw you. I am a hermit 
here, caring for none, cared for by none. And 
it has grown upon me to cling to my cave. 
Personal defects, morbid shrinkings from ridi- 
cule, scorn to be scorned by things I scorn, 
overpowering sense of dissimilarity, mortified 
pride as to fulfilling expectations, dread of the 
dependent helplessness of poverty, and a host 
of things, some little and mean enough, others 
larger and unspeakable, make me hold back 
from returning East. . . . 

I know that Duty is the one end, — and 
our acquired knowledge is a ridiculous mote. 



74 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

at the best, — yet it is the noble hunger of the 
soul — this after truth. And to me Duty seems 
to say that one particle added to the world's 
true knowledge, or a single effort put forth to 
make men see higher things than food and 
money-getting, is better than all bread-and- 
meat philanthropies. . . . 

Sacramento, Aug. 16, 1863. 

... I'm great on analogies, you know (de- 
fect in my mind, maybe — imagination de- 
veloped at expense of reason) — Well — I often 
think what if we should set our children at 
some occupation or other — told them, for in- 
stance, to stir the pudding or the potato in the 
kettle lest it burn, while we went upstairs for 
something — and Billy should say to Sammy, 
"don't let's stir — what's the use — don't see 
the reason " — and so we should come back and 
find the dinner burnt up. Oh, how we 'd trounce 
'em! 

That's an absurd way of putting it, and not 
as it was in my mind, but I'm rattling ahead 
to-night, not stopping to take care — but I so 
very often think of us as foolish children who 
get fretful, and scared, and maybe to crying for 
Pa to strike a light so that we can see him, and 
so on, when if we only knew a little more, it is 
all right. You see, I take it for certain that these 
innate human instincts (as, the conviction of 



CALIFORNIA 75 

the duty of obeying conscience, the obligatori- 
ness of duty, the duty of seeking true knowledge, 
and attaining our ideal of character, etc.) as 
the word of God to us. Intuitions must be the 
commands of God. Nonne? They are the voice 
of the Father, in the night, when we can neither 
see his face nor touch his hand, but are silly 
children if we do not obey without getting 
frightened at the dark. Trusting to what that 
same Voice tells each of us that it will be morn- 
ing in a few hours, and light (and not a single 
man ever lived who has not heard that from the 
Voice). My belief is that these analogies are 
not merely accidental things — but are meant 
to teach us. . . . 

To his classmate Henry Holt he wrote more 
fully on this matter than to any one else, and, 
immature as the letter is, it is also illuminat- 
ing:— 

"You ask for a 'brief summary of my rea- 
sons for believing in immortality. You need 
not have stipulated for the brevity. The rea- 
sons for are few and short, to me. The reasons 
against are the ones which would take up room 
in telling. Perhaps the former have force enough 
to overbalance the weak hosts of the latter — 
I hope so. — I do not think immortality can 
be made to appear very certain to us. 'Lord, we 
beseech thee,' is about all we can say for our- 



76 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL ' 

selves. Here is my best reason for such hope as 
the occasional gleam of sunshine lets me have. 

; "Who forged that other influence 
That heat of inward evidence 
By which he doubts against the sense?' 

That and the belief, yea, the implanted cer- 
tainty which all the devils cannot root out, that 
God is Perfect — 

" s Thy power and love — my love and trust, 
Make one place everywhere.' 

Cousin thinks he has proved that man must be 
immortal, if God is just. If I was sure of that, 
it would forever end all doubt with me. I cannot 
believe that there is any real evil in the universe, 
because I cannot make such an idea compatible 
with God's Perfectness. I believe pain and 
pleasure are both in the end, in some mysteri- 
ous way, a<ya6a, iravra cicada. If annihilation is a 
real evil to man, or an injustice from God, that 
settles it with me as impossible. But — The 
great reason against immortality, to my mind, 
is the question, Why should man be immortal? 
What is there in us worth perpetuation? Why 
should such a thing be kept, and not moulded 
over as the other temporary existences are? 
Then again I hear the 

" 'little whisper, silver clear,' — 
As from some blissful neighborhood, 
A motion faintly understood, — 
' I see the end and know the good.' 
' A hidden hope,' the voice replied." _, 



CALIFORNIA 77 

"I cannot accept what you say about Chris- 
tianity without a 'but' or two. Your theory is 

tempting, I acknowledge, but, H , there 

are one or two stern, uncompromising turns of 
'either-or' logic, which won't let me accept 
peace on that basis. Either Christ was God, 
or He was not. And if He was, we must take 
what He said as actual truth, not to be twisted 
or turned aside for you or me, if we were nine 
times the men we are. Through his name, his 
sacrifice, and his intercession, and thus alone, 
can we inherit eternal life. I seem to see Him 
standing there, on the common ground that 
other men were treading, with the actual every- 
day sunshine on his meek head, with a solemn, 
earnest face looking at you and me as we stand 
with the multitude about Him, and saying 
with that awful 'authority,' efouo-ia?, which 
He is said to have always seemed to have, 'he 
that believeth shall be saved — he that be- 
lieveth not shall be damned.' 'He that be- 
lieveth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he 
that believeth not shall not see life.' And out 
of that word 'believeth' it is impossible to get 
any but the plain, straightforward meaning 
of accepting his claims and assertions as ab- 
solute truth. . . . You speak of Tennyson, — I 
take it that in 'In Memoriam' we have the 
autobiography of his progress through disbelief, 
doubt, to full faith — I don't mean that he 



78 EDWAKD ROWLAND SILL 

wrote it as such, but his views show them- 
selves from epoch to epoch of his mind's life. 
The introduction was written last, and I in- 
terpret that as orthodox Church-of '-England be- 
lief in the Christian religion. . . . 

"Another thing. I came at Christianity one 
night thinking about what we are, and what 
God must be, from another side (don't you 
know, that often we seem to think around to a 
certain subject by way of a new train of thought, 
and suddenly seem to come upon it from an en- 
tirely different point of the compass from our 
usual view of it). I was thinking out into the 
material universe creeping out from star to 
star, from system to system, till I got way 
off where I was afraid almost of the awful dis- 
tance and darkness, and then still there was 
infinite space stretching on and on, and no 
nearer to God, yet, — where was my Maker? 
Not there; the air and ether even of boundless 
space was not the medium in which He was. 
Completely as my little human soul shrunk 
and cowered before the mere material universe, 
still there was another more awful, more in- 
conceivable — the universe of Spirit, in which 
(except that 'in,' which denotes a space-rela- 
tion, means nothing when used of that world) 
God is — and as the overwhelming thought 
came upon me of the utter, hopeless distance 
(for that means space, that can be traversed) 



CALIFORNIA 79 

between Him and us, I suddenly thought — 
Oh, if we had a Mediator — some one to stand 
upon the boundary land. If God would but 
reveal Himself, and tell us some little word 
that we might cling to as actual truth, among 
all the shadows. And then I thought how 
could He, how could He be likely to, but 
through the Perfect Man. And my ideal im- 
agination of what such a revealed God would 
be, and what he would do and say to men in 
such a world, so tallied with all we know of 
Jesus, the Son of Man, that I was awed — 
thinking what things we may have been re- 
jecting. -"■- 

"I used to think if God revealed Himself to 
the world, He would have given some sign 
which would have compelled belief, — some 
great miraculous revelation, — but what could 
He have done which we should have been sure 
of as the work of Him? If He had blazed across 
the sky in some terrible grand spectacle — or 
given any conceivable display of power — how 
could we have known that it was not the work 
of some lesser divinity — some evil arch- 
angel or (if you dislike the Bible name) some 
inhabitant of Sirius or the Pleiads? If you will 
but think of it, the only possible way to con- 
vince us completely, and beyond chance of 
doubt, would have been to re-create for us 
the universe, before our eyes, — and even then 



80 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

we should not be sure but it was some phan- 
tasm and deceit. Does it not seem probable 
that He would do just what this strange book 
says He had done? Coming as a man, doing 
a few simple miracles to attract men's atten- 
tion and prove that He was at least more than 
mere man, making his miracles acts of benefi- 
cence, to prove that he was a good, not evil, 
Superhuman, proving his wisdom by his knowl- 
edge of the human heart and his ethical teach- 
ings, his unselfishness by his life and death, his 
perfect purity and truth by a sinless character? 
Even as I write, I am almost persuaded to be 
a Christian. I have prayed and do pray for 
light, — and if I seek truth with a pure desire 
and intention, I believe I shall find it at last." 

He now debated the ministry and halted 
between two opinions. In this letter, written 
from Oakland in June, 1866, he seems to be 
sure of the negative decision; — who could 
help being deflected toward literature with a 
volume of poems in his trunk? — but within 
the year, he and Shearer were on their way to 
the Harvard Divinity School. 

"I've been writing a lot of poetry. Shall 
want to consult you about it when I see you. 
Have got one poem of about a thousand lines 
and a lot of short ones, about as much more, 
enough to make a gay little volume, if illus- 



CALIFORNIA 81 

trated a little, and got out nicely — but as to 
the inside don't know — the more I write the 
less satisfied I am with any of my doings in 
poetry — verily, art is different from handi- 
craft as Grimm says — only the perfect works 
ought to be given to the public — a bad boot 
or a tolerable article of cloth may be worth 
offering for sale — but when it comes to offer- 
ing tolerable art — after Tennyson and the 
Brownings — 't won't do — a poor devil ought 
to be hung for doing it — unless he be very 
poor, when his punishment might be commuted 
into imprisonment for life with only Tupper 
and the Country Parson for food and drink — 
in the way of stale toast or so. 

"I'm reading Marx's 'Musical Composi- 
tion.' Ever read it? . . . 

"You ask . . . what I — we — want to do 
when we get on there. ... I can't tell at all till 
I have got there, found how my health is going 
to be, how much chance of literary success there 
is for me, how much of musical . . . 

"I can't ever preach — that has slowly set- 
tled itself in spite of my reluctant hanging on 
to the doubt — I can't solve the problems — 
only the great schoolmaster Death will ever 
take me through these higher mathematics of 
the religious principia — this side of his school- 
ing, in these primary grades, I never can 
preach. — I shall teach school, I suppose." 



82 EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 

It is one of the surprises in Sill's correspond- 
ence as in his writings to find how few are the 
allusions to the war. Except for his poem on 
the death of Lincoln, it never inspired his 
muse. Not that he was indifferent; he was too 
much of an abolitionist for that; but appa- 
rently he felt that the moral issue was being 
obscured, and his sympathies were estranged. 
In 1862 he wrote: — 

"The war still drags along. We hear by tele- 
graph the main facts — when there are any 
— about as soon as you do — but none of the 
particulars till the steamer brings the New 
York papers. I wish we had acknowledged the 
Southern Confederacy in the first of it, then 
wiped the pro-slavery blot out of our consti- 
tution and then pitched in and wiped out the 
South, with 'Freedom' out on our banners fair 
and square. I hope in the 1st of January x and 
an overruling Providence. God is just, and the 
right is bound to prevail in the end." 

Again in the same year he expresses his dis- 
satisfaction with the course of events: — 

"I hear that 2 is captured, and am not 

sorry. For he will be well treated, and it is 
better than fighting on the Devil's own side, 
especially with the risks of getting verily 

1 The 1st of January, 1863, — the date on which the Emanci- 
pation Proclamation went into effect. 

2 A friend on the Confederate side. 



CALIFORNIA 83 

* thrown overboard' by some patriotic rifle 
ball. . . . The war * drags its slow length along.' 
I wish we were well out of it. What a hideous 
farce it has been so far. I am glad you are not 
in it. A wise Providence will bring good out of 
it all — but through much that is evil. God's 
will be done!" 

In 1863, after Emancipation had become a 
fact, there was a new note in his letters : — 

"How people's ideas have advanced since the 
war commenced : We abolitionists are no longer 
the feeble minority — when so many of the 
faces of their own sons and brothers are be- 
grimed with gunpowder and the smoke of bat- 
tle, even the old wooden-headed Democrats 
don't look very critically to see whether the 
men who are fighting for the flag had white 
skins originally or black. They have tried hard 
to get up a war in this State — have fitted out 
pirates in the harbors (which Uncle Sam has 
nabbed) , got up secret organizations and arms, 
etc., and several leading politicians have gone 
to Dixie to fight for Jeff and slavery. But there 
is too much New England, Ohio, and Michigan 
blood out here to allow their chivalry any 
chance." 

Many years afterwards the recipient of some 
of these letters, jotting down his recollections 
of Sill, summed up the California period and 
added another to the list of professions which 



84 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

beckoned to him during these years of uncer- 
tainty. 

" A few months after reaching California, Sill 
decided to study law. But I fancy that his legal 
studies, if ever taken up, were very brief. It 
would be difficult to imagine a man of ability 
less fitted than Sill for practising law. Some- 
what later he came under the influence of a 
physician, and for a while had some serious 
intention of studying and practising medicine. 
No doubt he was led in that direction by the 
desire of getting his living in a business that 
could be made, he thought, philanthropic. But 
afterwards he was glad that he did not engage 
in the study of medicine, for he had lost con- 
fidence in the specific certainty of medical 
knowledge. Another project that Sill very seri- 
ously considered, during his first stay in Cali- 
fornia, was going on to the stage as an actor. 
"He told me that several times when in San 
Francisco, he passed and repassed the theatre 
trying to brace up his courage enough to go in 
and ask the manager for employment; but 
turned away without going in. If Sill could 
have endured the drudgery of an actor's work 
and some other objectionable features of the 
business, there can be but little doubt that he 
would have risen so to eminence. He had most 
of the physical qualities — which are so im- 
portant. He was tall, straight, well-shaped; his 



CALIFORNIA 85 

features were regular, his face mobile, his eyes 
large and expressive; his voice was sonorous 
and flexible, and in utterance was agreeably 
distinct, so that what he said without effort 
was easily understood in a crowded room. In 
the movement of his arms and legs he was 
rather angular, but not so much so as Sir Henry 
Irving. There can hardly be any doubt that 
his capacity for mastering and learning to ren- 
der a part was great; and his mind had so much 
original insight, and was so fertile in expedients, 
that his acting, when he had become thoroughly 
at home in the work, would have abounded 
in * creations.' But, with all his qualifica- 
tions, he could not quite make up his mind to 
seek a place on the stage. I do not know 
whether Sill ever seriously thought of painting 
or drawing as a lifework. He had an aptitude 
for both. With suitable instruction and per- 
sistent effort he could have won distinction 
with brush or crayon. Music Sill hungered for, 
as for necessary food. His taste, by natural 
affinity, was of the best. With great composers 
he seemed to be at one in their most serious 
moods. He acquired considerable skill in 
playing upon several musical instruments, but 
never practised enough to master any; yet in 
rendering some short production that he had 
become familiar with, he showed exquisite 
sensibility and power of expression." 



V 

SETTLING DOWN 

Sill probably little realized, when he sailed 
from San Francisco in the summer of '66, that 
the two great questions of life were both to be 
answered for him so soon — that within the 
year he would be mated in love and settled in 
his life-work. 

He sailed on the 18th of June, in company 
with his friend Shearer, still inseparable, on the 
same ship and under the same captain that had 
brought them 'round the Horn five years be- 
fore. The last line before sailing was a hasty 
scrawl to his classmate, [Governor] Simeon 
Baldwin: — 

Dear Simmun, — I think this is about pos- 
itively the last from this side the planet. I hope 
when we get East that you and I may have the 
opportunity to make each other's acquaint- 
ance. 

In summing up the years I've been here I 
find that very few friends have passed the 
valves of the auricle and ventricle. Mighty 
few, as Sex [Shearer] w'd say, — and conse- 
quently there's room in that capacious organ 



SETTLING DOWN 87 

for not only the old shoots to remain un- 
crowded, but to enlarge and spread in it. 

It is bedtime and my pipe is smoked out. I 
wish I had an angel to put her wings over me, 
as you have, I rejoice to reflect. I suppose this 
particular Beast is not considered quite worthy 
of Beauty yet. So good-night. 

There was no journal on the return voyage, 
and apparently there were no letters, though 
there seems to have been some labor of the file 
upon the poems alluded to in an earlier letter, 
and there is a passage in "The Earth-Spirit's 
Voices" which seems to belong to this voyage 
rather than the earlier one. He has been writ- 
ing of the voices of earth "appealing to mortal 
spirits across the barrier of the limited human 
intelligence," and he goes on: — 

"At sea, also, I once heard this unavailing 
cry. It was a hundred miles, and more, from 
the coast of Brazil. The night was clear star- 
light, the breeze light and steady, so that we 
were sailing silently. The stillness, indeed, was 
so unusual that we were all leaning at the 
weather rail, listening to it, and peering far off 
into the vanishing waste of waves. Suddenly a 
distant cry arose from the night; no one could 
say where, or how. Then it was twice repeated : 
not a human cry, that is certain : perhaps a sea- 
bird's, but not like that of any bird or beast 



88 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

I ever heard. If it expressed anything, it was 
not pain nor fear, but some intense, infinitely 
lonely desire." 1 

Sill and Shearer had determined to go to the 
Harvard Divinity School, there to study the- 
ology ; having selected the place because, as one 
of their friends surmised, "they would not be 
required there to believe so much as in other 
American schools" — a design which, in Sill's 
case, was destined to defeat; for, as the same 
friend confesses, "the beliefs were too much for 
him"; or, as he put it himself not unscornfully 
sometime later, "I found it was the same old 
whine in new bottles." But that is to antici- 
pate. Now, arriving in New York in the late 
fall of '66, the travellers went on to Cambridge 
to look the ground over, and Sill then turned 
back for a visit with his relatives in Ohio 
before settling down to texts and commenta- 
tors. An eventful enough visit it proved. From 
Cuyahoga Falls he writes in December: — 

Dear H , — I intended to let you hear 

of my safe arrival here before this, but visit- 
ors can't write letters, and I find myself a 
visitor, and almost stranger, at my " home " — 
so long have I been away. 

I was in hopes to have heard from you, but 

1 The Prose of Edward Rowland Sill, pp. 48. 49. 



SETTLING DOWN 89 

I suppose you are waiting to know where I am. 
I found things in Cambridge more favorable 
than I had expected; they will pay most of 
my expenses, furnish room, books, etc., and a 
man's tenets or intentions are not in the ques- 
tion at all with them — which it is gay. 

I shall go there sans doubt, and commence 
with the term at the end of February. I may 
decide to go right on there next month and 
settle myself. Whenever I go it is my hope and 
intention to stop among you for a season. 
Ralphy says his bed is always twoable, and I 
want to get acquainted with you all. It was a 
little snip of a " see " which I got at you there, 
yet I enjoyed it very much. 

Mrs. Florrie! The music I received at the 
depot and thank you very much. I have been 
longing for those " Songs Without Words " for 
a great while. I believe I love Mendelssohn 
best of all. I wish I knew something about 
music. It was very kind in you to send me that 
music. I have n't heard it yet. The piano here 
is in a vile state of out-of-tunitiveness, but is to 
be reformed so soon as the man from Cleveland 
can come down to our little village to it. Then 
I shall hear them all, though I can't play them. 
My fingers don't know how to find their way 
without great deliberation and bungling. I can 
only pick out little easiest places from good 
music. Perhaps that is something like the way 



90 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

in which my present acquaintance with you 
stands. Indeed, I don't know but it would hold 
of H , too, now. 

I think I shall see you in about a month. 
Affectionately your friend, 

Ed. Rowland Sill. 

This miserable climate ! A perfect caricature 
of our California rainy season ! I 've had a cold 
and the blues ever since I got home here. 

Sweetest privilege of friendship — an ear 
whereinto one may growl! May n't I? 

In the next letter the poems reappear, and 
the plan for a book, "The Hermitage, and 
Other Poems," — the only volume offered to 
the public in Sill's lifetime, — takes more defi- 
nite form. It came out something more than a 
year later and had a reception not wholly novel 
for a poet's first book, of which more when the 
time comes. Meantime, the past tense and the 
tone of the comment sound the final chord in 
the little love song that quavered so uncer- 
tainly in California: — 

Cuyahoga Falls, Xmas, '66. 

Dear H , — I am sorry you have had 

so much nuisance in that old Concertina — 
peace to its ashes. — Let 'er repose on some 
shelf of yours. I am greatly obliged by your 
effort to lay the ghost, but if it won't " down," 



SETTLING DOWN 91 

let it stay up and be . I perceive it will 

be like poor Sparrowgrass' hoss, which he 
could n't even get anybody to steal. 

You just go to work and get over that 
"separation" idea as an attachment to the 
Theol. idea of SilL Going to be nothing of the 
kind. Is thy servant to be a Jesuit? Nay, not 
even a priest. A " Minister " if you will — are 
we not all ministering spirits? Impossible to 
separate us — and I not only feel confident 
that I can't be done so to, but I know that so 
long as I live I shall be trying, at least, to be the 
kind of man whom you must Kke and cleave to. 

I don't think you'd better send the Poems 
back — I '11 send you soon a piece to insert in 
Hermitage — a footnote, as who should say, 
"This whelp was in love, that he whines so." 
Also some short pomes. 

Dear Mrs. Florrie: — Merry Xmas and 
a most Happy New Year to you. I think you 
write a most delightful business letter. I am 
afraid you spoke a little too warmly about the 

poems, though I'm glad Mr. L likes them, 

so do I — some of them — but not all. I liked 
Bob W.'s l ever so muchly. 

The Hermitage is subjective, of course, — so 
is Life, to us. The public must be educated to 

1 Robert Kelley Weeks, of the class of 1862. He published 
several poems in the Nation, and a couple of small volumes, 
got the enthusiastic approval of Stoddard and Stedman, and 
died young. 



92 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

be more subjective themselves. " Pomes " are 
not to tickle them but to help them up. I don't 
want it to be any mere dramatic — a " dram " 
in the "attic" is not the way I write my 
poetry, but by sunshine, on cold water, in the 
same room I live in. Could perhaps put in 
some Swinburne, but don't approve of looking 
at life from that sty and trough. 

I am really glad at heart that you and 

H enjoyed reading my things, for I like 

you both so much, and should be very suspi- 
cious of poems which did not please you at all. 

I am having a pleasant visit at my uncle's 
here — a sort of second father he is to me. But 
I am having some perplexities to manage and 
worried a good deal — hope it will be over in a 
little, when I will write you less like a maniac. 
I am curious to see your footnotes on my 
margins. 

Yours very — 

Ed. R. Sill. 

The next letter tells its own story, and needs 
no comment. 

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, Jan. 27, 1867. 
I would not inconvenience you so con- 
stantly, but I have changed my plans so much 
as to make it necessary to bother somebody 
and I prefer you. 



SETTLING DOWN 93 

So much for biz — 

Now open your ears for some news. You 
and Mrs. Florrie are hereby invited to my 
wedding on Thursday evening, February 7th. 
My cousin Bess is to be the bride. Not the 
"little Mrs. Browning" whom you suspected, 
but her sister. I smiled at you having hit the 
nail without having hit it on the head. Eliza- 
beth Newbury Sill (daughter of my best uncle 
and my guardian all through my college days) , 
sometimes called Bess, also Bessie, also Lizzie, 
also Eliz. It is a love match which has been 
about ten years getting up. I 've loved her ever 
since I was a little chap, and she me. We al- 
ways tacitly considered the consanguinity as a 
barrier, till, lately, we have decided to smash it 
— and very lately have decided to marry soon, 
and yesterday fixed the day as above stated. 

Are you glad I 'm going to be happy at last? 
I have always longed so for a satisfied, unim- 
peded love, given and taken — now I have it. 
I need not tell you, who have been there, that I 
cannot love other friends less but always more 
for this — the other boys probably can't under- 
stand that so well except, to be sure, as you 
have made the demonstration. 

We shall stay here a week after marrying, 
then visit a friend in Titusville, Pennsylvania, 
for two days, then to Brooklyn, and in New 
York I shall see you. Some day Mrs. Bess and 



94 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

I will walk in on you at the store and damage 
your business for a while. I am going to Cam- 
bridge all the same, and Bess is to stay here till 
I get through there. Her father wants her for 
housekeeper and pet till I can and must take 
her away from him. 

From New York she comes back here with 
some relatives, and I stay and see you folks 
awhile and then go up to Cambridge. 

I am in a hurry to write some other neces- 
sary letters so good-night. Remember us, you 
two, Thursday night of next week, and think 
your good wishes across to us. 

Yours, doubly, 

E. R. S. 
Good-night. 

Sill's stay in Cambridge was too short for the 
best results; but the unsatisfactoriness of it did 
not lie wholly, nor perhaps even chiefly, in its 
brevity. Had he remained longer in those sur- 
roundings he might have penetrated into the 
currents of high and eager intellectual life which 
ran so strongly there, but it is not certain that 
he would. His pride, his native reserve, and 
his lack of contacts with the contemporaneous 
thought of America, as well as of Europe, made 
it unlikely. Nevertheless, that a genuine poet, 
of no unworthy achievement, should come 
into the neighborhood of Lowell, Longfellow, 



SETTLING DOWN 95 

Holmes, Emerson, and Norton and yet meet 
none of them, seems hardly short of a tragedy. 
Among the fruits of the months which he 
spent at the Divinity School was the hymn, 
" Send down thy truth, O Lord," written for 
a fellow-student's ordination and now a 
favorite, not only in the Unitarian communion, 
but beyond its boundaries. 

The letters from Cambridge, such as are 
preserved, are all addressed to classmates. Few 
as they are, they tell the story in outline, indi- 
cating his lessening interest in theology and his 
growing realization of the necessity of making 
a living by some other means. His attempts 
to make light of the rebuffs at the hands of 
editors and of his own expectations from 
the forthcoming volume need not deceive us. 
Poets at twenty-six are not a callous folk, and 
there never was a less indifferent member of 
the genus irritabile. 

Cambridge, April 8, 1867. 
Deakly Beloved [his classmate, Henry 
Holt], — Yours have been received, but I have 
been waiting for a good chance when I should 
feel like writing a letter. The Ticknor one you 
enclosed was my regular one, of course. No 
comments. I can't avoid the conclusion that 
the " Atlantic " and I don't agree as to what is 
decent poetry. I warn you in time — if you 



96 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

take hold of those poems you '11 have the Mags 
down on 'em and the books unsold. They're 
not popular — whether they're good or not. 
I have n't had the requisite cultivation; and 
besides my knocking around and feeling the 
cold shoulder of things has n't improved the 
imaginative powers — the delicacy is blunted, 
and bloom gone — if they were there. I believe 
that born into a rich Englishman's son's shoes, 
like all of those chaps, I could have added to the 
world's little stock of poetry. As it is, I'm out 
and some one else is in, and there 's no help for 
it. So don't get into any scrape. I warn you, 
I shan't ieel at all more seedy than at present 
if you send that bundle up to me instead of to 
the printer. I grow less and less desirous to have 
them published every day I live. . . . 

Of course I need n't say that I 'm blue as 
the devil — started on a long track — straight 
track, you see — no curves concealing hidden 
and pleasant perhapses — pretty sandy, and 
only two foot-prints most of the way. 

She may be here next year, but 't will cost 
like thunder, and I see plainly that there is no 
hope of side earnings. This Taintor thing [Col- 
lege songs] is no go. I am trying to get him up 
some things, but I make a melancholy failure. 
Try to write some songs for young ones when 
you 're in the dumps, and see what you think 
of it! I'm going to send some things to him in 



' SETTLING DOWN 97 

your care because he was to change his address 
and I don't know it. Will you address 'em to 
him? Wretched things, not worth a cent a 
thousand — I wrote till towards morning on 
'em t' other night and condemned 'em to the 
fire in the morning — that's my present style. 
I'm not pregnant and how can anything be 
born? The god has n't embraced my Muse for 
a good many months. 

Good place to study here, poor place for 
anything else, so I won't even try any longer to 
write a letter. 

Now I 'm going at Mr. Cousin's ideas of the 
idea of God. Mr. Monkey 's chattering about 
the man who threw a stone at him the other 
day — or was it cakes he threw? The monkey 
can't tell. 

Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Cambkidge, Mass., Apr., 1867. 
I am enjoying my opportunities here hugely. 
They give me books and let me alone — what 
more could a man ask? Besides, some good lec- 
tures outside — Agassiz, etc. I went to a sa- 
cred concert last Sunday night in Music Hall. 
It was very fine — I don't know that I ever 
enjoyed music so much. Did n't hear the great 
organ, though, so I am going over to hear 
that in an orchestral concert this p.m. Sunday 



98 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

night there was glorious orchestra music, and 
Arbuckle had a cornet arrangement of 'Ade- 
laide' with orchestra which nearly drew my 
heart out of my body. I have always raved 
about that song, but never heard it perfectly 
given before. What a splendor brass is when 
exquisitely played — how it winds and winds 
into one's very Ego, and tangles itself up with 
the emotions and passions and soars up with 
them. The wood sings all around one — the 
strings wail and implore to us — but the brass 
enters in and carries one off bodily. Do you 
concur? I want to hear that great organ — it 
was music only to look at it — a great, dark, 
shadowy cathedral looming up at the end of the 
immense Hall — Apollo Belvedere up in a niche 
opposite, looking scornful, as if to say that all 
that solemn, shadowy, bitter-sweet music — 
the heartbroken triumph — the fire of tears — 
is poor by the side of his memories of the Greek 
health and energy, and music that was sunshine 
dissolved in wine. — But one looks back to 
the statue of the Master in front of the organ, 
and thinks the man is truer than the false 
god. 

Delightful spring weather — trees coming 
out — grass green. Nature is all under good 
subjection, though, about here — not even a 
Tutor's Lane to refresh the wild part of a 
man. 



SETTLING DOWN 99 

Wisconsin gone for Woman's Suffrage! . . . 
It's gay, is n't it? — Massachusetts must hang 
her head and be second chop hereafter. 

I think pomes] must be; anonymous. Are 
you going to arrange for summer? 

Cambridge, May 22, '67. 

Dear H — , . . . Sex and I have been talking 
about Zschokke — have his stories been trans- 
lated? If not, why would n't it be a bully idea 
to do it? And why could n't Sex and I trans- 
late, say a half dozen or eight or ten or two, to 
put in a volume together. I have a volume here 
containing twenty-one stories — "Zschokke's 
Novellen." They are very fine, to my taste, 
and ought to be as popular here as in Vater- 
land. What say you? 

The way I look at it as concerning the owl x 
is this — that solemn bird has confined its hoot- 
ing lately to lightish things. You need some- 
thing more solid — for a change. Zschokke 
is a sort of mixture of Jean Paul, G. P. R. 
James, and Kingsley. There's love, ethics, 
political economy, and transcendentalism. . . . 

He had evidently been invited to look up 
some facts and personal impressions of Tenny- 
son among those in Boston and vicinity who 

1 An allusion to the colophon of Holt's publishing house which 
bears the figure of an owl. 



100 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

knew the poet. The brief reply points again his 
isolation in Cambridge — of which he was 
keenly conscious: — 

" I could n't unearth anything here about 
Tennyjson], 'cause I don't know a soul and 
can't know 'em — to "root around among 
my landlady and my washerwoman would n't 
be productive." 

Summer found him again in the hospitable 
home at Cuyahoga Falls and in a mood of 
comparative calm. The book appeared in the 
spring of 1868 and was received with the se- 
verity which, for no explainable reason, it 
sometimes befalls a first book of verse to en- 
counter. The reviewer in the "Nation," then, 
as now, looked to by the author with peculiar 
solicitude, was particularly harsh. Together 
with other severities, and the indifference of 
the public, this sufficiently discouraged Sill 
from further publication. Never again did he 
venture into the public with a book. It was 
only after his death that the now familiar little 
blue volumes — "Poems," "The Hermitage," 
and "Hermione" — were brought out. Later 
still came " The Prose of Edward Rowland Sill " 
and the "Collected Poems." Meanwhile the 
modest square green volumes of 1868 have 
become dear to booklovers and listed among 
collectors' "desiderata." 



SETTLING DOWN 101 

As to the translating, he had misjudged his 
temperament. He was far too high-strung for 
that plodding sort of labor, as he discovered 
when he undertook to put Richter's " Coopera- 
tive Stores" into English. 

Cambridge, Monday Morning. 

Dear H , — We neither of us understand 

French. Your German chap better take last 
chapter and go on backward to meet us — we 
can't go any faster than now. I have been put- 
ting in every available hour since I began — it 
is the hardest sort of stuff we could possibly 
undertake, half the words not in the dictionary, 
only to be guessed at. Customs, etc., referred 
to which I never heard of and also must guess 
at. I have n't touched study or recitation since 
I commenced; there was a recess last week — 
anniversary week, and I flunked all the meetings 
except one — the Free Religion meeting. Forty 
stories and a dozen poems would be child's play 
to one work on Polit. Econ. for a foreigner. 
Your German cove will have a good deal of 
it to do, if it is to come out "immediately," 
and I'm very glad you have got him at hand. 

Had I better call Statuten rules, and how in 
the name of all the Teufels shall we translate 
Markengeschafte — ticket-method is the near- 
est I can come to it. How much shall I call a 
franc in cents? A thaler I have computed at 



102 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

.72 — taking it from this author's statement 
that 6.66f thalers = 1 pound sterling. 

Rushing this so, I have no time to correct 
phraseology, or think of notes, but a revision 
may be possible in proof-sheets. Please answer 
immediately. 

Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

P.S. We can't make it go an inch faster, and 
there 's no one here who could help. You had 
better put the German chap hard at it, and 
unless he's a sight faster than we, two of them. 

The end of the academic year saw the end 
of Sill's relation to the Divinity School and he 
relinquished theology, though, as appears from 
the next letter, not without a lingering back- 
ward look: for he was a preacher all his life 
long. 

Cuyahoga Falls, August, 1867. 
Sunday p.m. 

Dear Henry, — I wonder how and where 
this hot afternoon finds you. It is too hot here 
to do anything, yet I am moved to write you a 
sweltering word or two. 

I have determined not to return to Cam- 
bridge. There could be no pulpit for me after 
going through there, except as an independ- 
ent, self-supported minister, which of course 
is open to any one with a purse. I came re- 



SETTLING DOWN 103 

luctantly to that conclusion. Another person, 
even with my opinions in theology, might have 
judged differently. It is no sentimentalism with 
me — it is simply a solemn conviction that a 
man must speak the truth as fast and as far as 
he knows it — truth to him. I may be in error 
. — but what I believe is my sacred truth, and 
must not be diluted. When I get money enough 
to live on I mean to preach religion as I be- 
lieve in it. Emerson could not preach, and now 
I understand why. 

So, the alternatives. 

School teaching always has stood first. No 
decent salaries in this country. No freedom to 
follow my own way. No position available so 
far as I know. Hence, California. 

After a quiet summer in Ohio, he returned 
to New York, there to make trial whether it 
was in him to earn his living by his pen. The 
fragments preserved of his writing at this time 
reveal his shortcomings as a journalist. He was 
too severe in subject and manner for the New 
York newspaper of the sixties. The story of 
the adventure is told in a single letter. The 
prose fragments which follow possess more than 
a little interest as giving his view of New York, 
and of the poems, one — "Summer Afternoon" 
— has a place in one of the slender volumes 
collected after his death. 



104 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

Brooklyn, N.Y., Nov., '67. 

I came to New York something over two 
months ago. Found nothing better than help- 
ing edit a one-horse paper. Did it six weeks. 
Did n't suit, and was n't suited, and quit. 
Am now translating a German romance [Ran's 
"Mozart"]. ... It will take me six weeks or 
more. . . . 

What a horrid bilk New York is, speaking 
of bilks. And the way they brag here — Lord 
John of the East — you'd think there was no 
other centre, and very little if any circumfer- 
ence. Fact is, they have so little conception 
here of the things there are to be known, that 
they easily believe they know it all. A man 
who never sees a tree, or a blade of grass, or a 
bit of sky, or stops still long enough to look down 
into another human being's eyes, of course has 
no interrogation points awakened in him. He 
has learned to know the streets of the city — 
which he remembers being ignorant of when he 
came here — and he has learned the cheap con- 
ventionalities — which he blushed not to know, 
once — and there's nothing else to learn, is 
there? So he knows it all, does n't he? And how 
he swells up and swaggers on the strength of 
it! ... I don't think a man needs any further 
provocation to cut his throat, in simple moral 
nausea, than to walk up Broadway, and then 
down it on the other side, after he has got suf- 



SETTLING DOWN 105 

ficiently used to the rattletebang to have his 
eyes about him, so as to examine the faces, ex- 
pressions, of features, gait, gestures, etc. . . . 

TIMOTHY GRASS TO BOHEMIAN GLASS 

To Bohemian Glass, Esq., New York City: — 

Dear Cousin, In the midst of my rural soli- 
tudes here in the little village of Greenville, as I have 
walked about the quiet fields, or through the au- 
tumnal woods, I have been thinking how "un- 
friended, melancholy, slow" our country life is, 
compared with the keen and swift current of yours 
in the great city. And for some weeks (for it takes 
us a good while to make up our minds in the coun- 
try), I have been resolving to reach out an epistolary 
hand to you, Cousin Glass, and ask you to write me 
occasional letters, as you can snatch the time from 
the whirl of your city avocations, giving me your 
ideas upon men and books, and the incidents and 
accidents of modern life. I say "modern life," for 
I well know that I am behind the times. You know 
my library. It consists of old books, for the most 
part. The old classics, the old standard authors — 
well, I believe I should cleave to them if I knew the 
moderns as well, but the moderns I do not know. 
Can you not, from time to time, give me little 
glimpses of the literature which comes and goes, 
foam-like, on the current of the present? And will 
you not, at the same time, tell me what is this great 
mystery of New York life, what are its pleasures, 
what does it give in compensation for the noise and 
hurry, and the absence of all sweet natural sounds 
and sights? For me, you know my pleasures; the 
morning walks, these breezy autumn days, golden 
alike with sunshine and the yellowing leaves; the 



106 EDWAKD ROWLAND SILL 

fragrant air of the still woods, the quiet sail down 
the winding river, with the ripples purling and 
plashing against the prow; the evenings in the old 
library at home, alone but seldom lonely, with my 
books around me, and the little parlor organ — 
the gilt pipes are rather tarnished, Cousin Glass, but 
the tones breathe purer and mellower for every 
passing year. There I sit and read, and meditate, 
and listen to the cheery crickets, and the Rune of 
the river; and if sometimes a little lonesome twinge 
comes over my back, like a sudden chill from a 
draft of air, I pat my dog's head, and look into his 
big, moist eyes (he looks me in the eyes like a man 
— did you ever see a dog do it?), and wonder how 
far aloof his soul will follow mine through the grada- 
tions of the future after we die. For we 're two old 
vagabonds, Leo and I, young as we are, and good 
for not much of anything but to lie in the sun. 

Well, I write poetry now and then. Your well-in- 
formed and judicious critical papers there in the 
city, which you have sent me, I see with grief do not 
approve of this employment. No doubt they have 
some good and wise reason for this opinion, but of 
course it would be impossible for me to ask such emi- 
nent and learned writers what it is. Perhaps they, 
like yourself, cousin Glass, have been so long in the 
splendid and glittering life of the city with its wis- 
dom and polish and art, that they have forgotten 
how beautiful the woods are and the gurgling brooks, 
and the stars that dust the water's dusky bosom 
with their fire. Perhaps they do not know how one 
is driven, as by "a certain divine madness," to 
hollow out in words a place for these splendors of 
nature and set them there, carved into expression 
with whatsoever fidelity one is capable of. 

Well, Cousin Glass, I am writing too long a 



SETTLING DOWN 107 

letter. Hoping for a speedy reply, I subscribe my- 
self your loving cousin, 

Timothy Grass. 
P.S. I send some verses which I wrote in the 
summer, perhaps they will sound a little like an 
echo now that autumn is come. 

Summer Afternoon 

Far in hollow mountain canons 

Brood, with purple-folded pinions, 
Flocks of drowsy distance-colors on their nests, 

And the bare, round slopes, for forests 

Have cloud-shadows, floating forests, 
On their breasts. 

Winds are wakening and dying, 

Questions low with low replying, 
Through the oaks a hushed and trembling whisper goes; 

Faint and rich the air with odors, 

Hyacinth and spicy odors 
Of the rose. 

Even the flowerless acacia 

Is one flower, such slender stature, 
With its latticed leaves a-tremble in the sun: 

They have shower-drops for blossoms. 

Quivering globes of diamond blossoms, 
Every one. 

In the blue of heaven holy 

Clouds of floating, floating slowly, 
Pure in snowy robes and sunny silver crown, 

And they look like gentle angels — 

Leisure-full and loitering angels, 
Looking down. 

Half the birds are wild with singing, 
And the rest with rhythmic winging 
Sing in melody of motion to the sight; 



108 EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 

Every little sparrow twitters, 
Cheerily chirps, and cheeps, and twitters 
His delight. 

Sad at heart amid the splendor, 

Dull to all the radiance tender, 
What can I for such a world give back again? 

Could I only hint the beauty — 

Some least shadow of the beauty — 
Unto men! 

TO ME. TIMOTHY GRASS, GREENVILLE 

Dear Cousin Timothy, — Got yours — glad to 
hear from you — will be pleased to correspond. We 
city folks need little whiffs of the woods and mea- 
dows now and then, to keep our hearts in the right 
place. Must n't expect much from me in the way 
of letters — have to write in a hurry, you know. 

You seem to think we're awfully wise, here in 
New York. Well, our life here is a good deal like 
railroad travelling — ■ whizz — bang — whirling by 
all sorts of things at a great rate, as if 't were for 
dear life. We on the inside poke our heads out of 
the windows, and look very wise — you 'd think 
we knew all about it — but we don't, Cousin 
Timothy — we don't. People out in the fields 
alongside half the time know a good deal more 
about it than we do — but we look as if we did, and 
a good many times we think we do; so it comes to 
the same thing, in most people's estimation. 

We 're not all so good here as you seem to think, 
either. It's a streak of fat and a streak of lean. 
Great many fine men here — great many good 
books written here — eloquent preachers — able 
lecturers, and all that — but some of us are great 
scamps, Cousin Timothy — great scamps. Yet, 
hosts of good men here, too — young brains, and 



SETTLING DOWN 109 

old ones, that are clear as a bell — not to be taken 
in by lies in opinion or lies in practice — true hearts 
that are brave as lions — splendid fellows putter- 
ing over dry day's-works — you would n't know 
them till some pinch comes — then you find them 
always in the right place. It's a little like needles 
in a haymow, to find them — no — more like hunt- 
ing the needles with a mighty magnet — every man 
with a magnet in his spinal column somewhere, 
that draws his like out of the crowd and fastens 
them to him. Here are a thousand faces, all 
strangers — all busy — suddenly you find you 
know every one you want to among them. Un- 
consciously the magnets were at work — out come 
your kith and kin. 

We are terribly busy here — blood thermometers 
are kept up to the boiling point — pulses tick fast, 
like little trip-hammers. No meditation — no 
musings. All is business, business, business. My 
brother, Blone Glass, who has tastes, says: "'Tis 
all very well; but this doing business is such a waste 
of time! " 'T is a good deal so, I admit. Men here 
are mainly bent on getting something for them- 
selves — money — houses — position — • well, peo- 
ple generally are bent on that. Human nature is 
mostly selfish, Cousin Timothy — i.e., out of our 
family. Still their toil and trouble goes for the most 
part to somebody else, after all. We are all better 
off for their shrewdness and energy. They "build 
better than they know." That's Emerson — you 
know him? Too modern for you, I suppose. That 
is nothing — turn him upside down, and imagine 
'tis a mouldy Brahmin, discoursing in the Punjab 
fifty thousand years ago, and you can't help liking 
him. I know you cling to your old-fashioned bards. 
But Emerson is worth the whole nursery of them. 



110 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

He is a perfect old telegraph line from the Infinite 
to this world. People don't like him because he is 
condensed and oracular, like all telegrams. They 
won't take the trouble to understand the message 
— prefer to get its substance, diluted, in the morn- 
ing papers. You want to know about modern 
writers — get Emerson and read him. Take his 
poems first. You '11 forgive his style easier as apolo- 
gized for by the music and the rhythm. 

Speaking of poetry — yours was very good — 
only Blone says that "Acacia does n't rhyme with 
stature, and never will!" And, Cousin Timothy! 
Don't write a thing in verse till you see it, sharp and 
clear before your mind's eye as a flash of lightning 
on a black sky. No danger but that you will feel 
truly enough. Mind you see truly, first. Good eye- 
sight — that's what the world wants. 

That's what we get in the city, too. If a man's 
eyes are not open, he gets run over every time he 
crosses the street. And that 's the way the purblind 
fellows are disposed of — run over, Cousin Timothy 
- — by sharper competitors, or by the press, or by the 
march of ideas, or some other driving institution. 
And we that survive get our wits sharpened at last. 

What we want from writers is new truths, truly 
put. If you have got one, in politics, in religion, in 
art, in philosophy, or in patent medicines — you 
are our man. 

I, too, send some lines. They're not dignified. 
We can't spend time to be dignified, in New York. 
You may not like the subject. Violets don't spring 
up and fade on Broadway, Cousin Timothy, but 
wall-eyed old steeds do. 

Good-bye, 

Yours truly, 

Bohemian Glass. 



SETTLING DOWN 111 

The Song of the Horse 

A poor old stage-horse, lank and thin, 
Not much else but bones and skin, 
I jog along, week out, week in, 
Kicked, and cursed, and meanly fed, 
Jammed in the side and jerked by the head — 
And the thing I can't at all make out 
Is, what on earth it's all about? 

Why was I made to toil and tug 
For this odd little human bug, 
Two-legged, dumpy as a jug, 
Who sits aloft, my ribs to batter — 
Or why was he made, for that matter? 
And, if I needs must be created, 
Why is it that I was not fated 
To prance and curvet, finely mated, 
Silver-harnessed, sleek and fat, 
With groom and blanket, and all that? 

Here I go, day after day, 
Pounding and slipping down Broadway, 
Dragging these curious biped things, 
With fore-legs gone, and yet no wings — 
Where they all go to I don't know, 
Nor why in the world they hurry so, 
Nor what good use Heaven puts them to ! 

It was n't my fault, you see, at all, 
That my joints grew big, and my muscles small, 
And so I missed of a rich man's stall, 
I'm clumsy, crooked, stupid, slow, 
Yet the meanest horse is a horse, you know, 
And his ribs can ache with the kick or blow, 
As well as the glossiest nags that go. -~- 
O Lord, how long will they use me so? 
And when may the equine spirit go 
Where glorified horses stand in a row, •■ 
Switching their bright tails to and fro, ' 



112 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

Careless of either wheel or whoa — 
Where oats are always a propos, 
And flies don't grow! 
Oh, no! 
O! 

BOHEMIAN GLASS AS AN EDITOR 
A Lamentation 

To Mr. Timothy Grass: — 

Dear Cousin Timothy, — 'T is pleasant to im- 
agine you there in your quiet library these chilly fall 
evenings, putting up your slippered feet in a chair 
before the fireplace, pulling down some "quaint 
and curious volume of forgotten lore," and having 
a good old drowsy, comfortable time of it. It makes 
"literature" seem a very nice thing to you, of 
course. Oh, you leisurely, unmolested fellows! 
What good, nonsensical, useless, blessed hours you 
can spend over books ! 

You 've no idea how sick we get of literature here. 
You've no idea what cartloads of stupid, wooden, 
flat, seasick stuff is written and printed here, day 
after day and year after year — you've no idea, 
and if you had, it would make you weep and howl. 
The periodical literature — you escape most of it 
out there, where, in a measure, remoteness acts as 
a kind of strainer, and gives you only the finer and 
more enduring writings. You, who have a sort of 
veneration for a writer, as if he were in some way a 
second cousin of Shakespeare and Plato — you 
should see the stuff which a person on a daily paper 
is obliged to see, in exchanges, periodicals, new 
publications, and so on. You should know what 
helpless donkeys some "writers" are. From 
"Godey's Lady's Book" (which Blone calls the 
"Great Female Mind Enfeebler") up to the last 



SETTLING DOWN 113 

new treatise on the "Inscrutable Periodicity of 
Perihelions." 

Then, too, you who adore the fine arts so much, 
should see the pictures in the police papers, which 
are posted up proudly at all the news stands, and 
surrounded by crowds of rapt and ravished gazers. 
The most filthy, brutal, beastly, abominable wood- 
cuts — and the bloated and leering fool-faces gloat- 
ing over them, from one end of Broadway to the 
other! 

Ah! Cousin Timothy. — "And God saw every- 
thing that He had made, and behold, it was very 
good." But that was ages ago — ages before 
Babylon was builded. It was all garden, then, and 
there was neither emigration, rum, nor fashionable 
religion. 

A writer on a paper has other crosses, too, be- 
sides a compulsory acquaintance with current litera- 
ture. He has his unpleasantnesses, " late " and early. 
For instance, I noticed a man's book in the paper. 
I did n't say it was nice. It was n't nice. He met 
me on Broadway. With a furious glare he roared, 
"Sir, you're an ass!" I replied, with a placid smile, 
" Sir, what of it? " He went away. 

I did n't deny his charge. Relatively speaking, 
perhaps, there was some truth in it. The fact is we 
are all a little tinged with a gentle asinine element. 
There's a certain amount of dulness, obstinacy, 
wrong-headedness, about all of us, if you get us in 
just the right light to show it. 

Strange what a natural and instinctive desire 
there is in the human breast to call somebody else 
an ass ! We come up against somebody's particular 
point of stupidity or perversity (or what seems so to 
our plans), and the soul is absolutely refreshed and 
exhilarated by expressing our feeling towards a 



114 



EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 



fellow-being in that Saxon epithet. How my heart 
bleeds for a man when I see him wrought up to ex- 
actly that pitch of emotion, but restrained and 
muzzled from satisfying his inward yearning by 
some conventional idea of dignity or politeness. 

'T is getting cold nights and mornings here in 
New York. The poor children that one sees, with 
their bare legs and their naked feet on the pave- 
ment, begin to strike one with a shivery sensa- 
tion. 

The placards in the drug-shop windows adver- 
tising "ice-cold soda-water" are getting to have a 
dreary aspect, as one glances at them of a drizzly 
cold morning. But winter is n't winter in New York, 
you know. It is philharmonics, and brilliant gather- 
ings, and opera — marrying and giving in marriage. 
Winter is no winter here for the rich, Cousin Timo- 
thy; for the poor, O 't is horrible! Freezing and star- 
vation, fiery rum, when no longer food is possible, 
hunger and cold goading men to robbery and 
murder, and women to despair and worse. God 
pity the city poor in winter, men will not. 

I enclose my usual splash of verses. 

In haste, yours truly, 

Bohemian Glass. 



The News Girl 

A tiny, blue-eyed, Elfin lass 
Meets me upon the street I pass, [ 

In going to the ferry; 
Barefooted, scantly clothed, and thin, 
With little weazen cheeks and chin, 

Yet always chirk and merry: 

Ever merry, however pale, 
I always hear her, as I draw near her — 

'"Ere's The Mail, sir !— Mail? — Mail?" 



SETTLING DOWN 115 

With that same piping little tune, 
She waits there every afternoon, 

Selling her bunch of papers; 
She scarcely looks aside to see 
What's passing by, of grief or glee — 

No childish tricks or capers; 

Her pattering bare feet never fail 
To run and meet me, and chirping greet me, 
'"Ere's The Mail, sir! — Mail? —Mail?" 

Her dingy frock is scant and torn, 
Her old, old face looks wan and worn, 

Yet always sweet and sunny; 
Week in, week out, she is the same — 
I asked her once what was her name, 

And, jingling all her money, 

Holding a paper up for sale, 
The little midget answered, "Bridget! 

Want The Mail, sir? — Mail? — Mail?" 

I wonder where she goes at night, 

And in what nook the poor young sprite 

Finds room for rest and sleeping; 
I wonder if her little bones 
Go home to blows and cuffs, and tones 

That roughly set her weeping — 

When, rainy days, the pennies fail 
And few were buying, for all her crying 

"'Ere's The Mail, sir! — Mail? — Mail?" 

O rich and happy people! you 

Whose ways are smooth, and woes are few, 

Whose life brims o'er with blisses, 
Pity the little patient face, 
That never knows the tender grace 

Of kind caress or kisses, 

For you, the blessings never fail; 
For her 't is only to wait there lonely 

And cry: "The Mail, sir? — Mail? — Mail?" 



116 EDWAKD; ROWLAND SILL 

At this last winding of the road as it enters 
upon the long straight stretch, it is interesting 
to see how the bends and turns of the course 
looked to Sill in retrospect. In writing to one 
of his own students at the University of Cali- 
fornia years later, he said : — 

"You are getting on toward the close of the 
Second Act — the college days : and no doubt 
the management of the Third Act begins to 
occupy your mind a good deal — and perhaps 
to vex it a little. What to do with one's life 
gets to be a large question toward the close of 
the senior year. In my own, I was saved a part 
of the question, for my health was frail and 
threatened me a little, so that the immediate 
duty was plain enough — to cut and run; which 
I did, on a long sea voyage; it was a toss-up 
which way it should be, among all the oceans 
and continents, but it happened to be to Cali- 
fornia. I had pretty much determined that I 
would try to get a better aim than the com- 
mon ones. 'I could not hide that some had 
striven/ at least, whatever they had 'attained.' 
Egoism, pure and simple, had somehow al- 
ways struck me — theoretically — as mighty 
paltry for a grown-up man; a kind of perma- 
nent child-condition. And I cast about for 
some way of combining service with bread and 
butter. The ministry, or teaching, I finally 
settled it must be for me. It was a little nar- 



SETTLING DOWN 117 

row ... to confine the choice to those two. 
I can see now that there are lots of ways to 
serve — more even than ways to get bread 
and butter. . . . 

"I . . . took a saddle-horse, rode about the 
country and hunted up a locality I liked the 
looks of, with a clean little school-house and 
wholesome-looking farm people about it, and 
taught that country school. I found there was 
no difficulty in doing it, after a fashion, at 
least; so I kept on. . . . 

"One thing is clear: a year or two of teach- 
ing is good honest work for any one — an ad- 
vantage to others, and to self (for others in the 
future), as well. But if you knew you should 
then go into medicine, I think I should not 
wait, but go into it at once. You may think 
medicine ministers only to the body — but, 
1, the body is a necessary condition of higher 
things, and 2, a good physician finds himself 
in one of the most influential positions in the 
community, for good. Nor need his work be 
confined to his lancet and pill-boxes (though 
there's a nobleness about those, when you 
think of the relations of mind and body), but 
there is an endless range of studies, and per- 
haps of writing, possible to such a profession. 

"One thing we must try to realize. Our in- 
dividual drop of force is only one in a great sea. 
Perhaps, even if we saw just what particular 



118 EDWAKD ROWLAND SILL 

piece of work the world most needed, we should 
not be the man for it. I see a number of things 
that need tremendously to be done; but I can't 
do them. I was n't properly endowed, or I 
had n't, and could n't have got, the training 
for it. Meantime I do what my hand finds to 
do and try not to fret .... Anyway, the 
thing is, not to spoil too much time and brains 
trying to be sure of the absolutely best work — 
but to use all reasonable effort to see, and then 
— even if in vexatious doubt — to strike into 
the most probably sensible course, and work 
like a locomotive. One can at least fix his 
course for a year ahead — and agree with his 
conscience to let him alone to work at that for 
the year. And so year by year, if no other way 
is possible to one's temperament, one can get 
through a fine stent of work in a lifetime." 

The summer he spent as usual in Ohio and 
succeeded in settling matters with himself. If 
Literature would n't give him a living Teach- 
ing must. 

Cuyahoga Falls, June, 1868. 

When a man is actually living, he and Na- 
ture laying their heads together, and things 
occupying whole days, all this use of symbols of 
things — words — becomes a sort of mouldy 
amusement, and my portfolio goes to sleep 
when I get into real outdoor life. I never got 
so near to Nature as this year — that is, to 



SETTLING DOWN 119 

homely Nature — not, the sublime. I mean 
to the good old mother Nature of gardens and 
ploughed fields and river and tame wood — 
the mistress sort of Nature I have had more to 
do with at some past times. 

So I have not written any poetry lately, 
- but have had some real satisfactory thinks and 
good useful times. What fun it is to see one's 
muscles swelling up a little from pushing a 
plane and handling spade and hoe, and to feel 
one's backbone stiffening up as by deposits of 
grit along the vertebrae. And what a whole- 
some thing it is to plant one's foundation on 
the ground under an apple tree, and soberly 
think — while digging up the sod with a dull 
jackknife — how life is a pretty fair genial 
thing after all, and how happiness evidently 
is n't the only thing the gods consider good for 
man; and how thoroughly it pays to try to 
keep healthy like the apple trees and the 
beasties and the winds and soil — and kick 
pleasures to the Devil, and be sturdy and real. 

Of course, one gets peevish and sentimental 
and sour and all other bad traits on him at 
times afterward, but he can look back for 
weeks to one thorough-going sensible forenoon, 
and bolster himself thereby. . . . 

It is a thousand pities that such fellows 
as you and I should n't be able to earn a decent 
living at some employment which wouldn't 



120 EDWARD ROWLAND SDLL 

grind dreadfully. But what the Lord wants us 
to learn, I begin to suspect, is to grind - — and 
that in the dreadfullest manner. . . . 

The fact is, we [ought to have learned some 
one practical disagreeable trade — not pro- 
fession, for it is better to be honest (the laws 
of the universe being as they are) . . . and we 
ought to have pitched into it as other people 
do — but this fair witch of poetry trips a 
man up. 

You say you've got a dead book — so have 
I. Jolly, ain't it? I 'm content over mine, 
though, and was long ago. If my shoemaking 
does n't suit, the shoes must lie on the shelf 
till I learn the trade better — that's all. 

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, Aug. 15, 1868. 
... I have made my mind up (and my 
spinal column, too, I trust — stiff and solid) 
to earn my b. and b. so far as possible by work 
that shall for other reasons, as well, seem useful. 
That 's the reason I prefer to teach rather than 
go into business or law, etc. I wish you New 
Haven fellows would collar every graduating 
man and make him see that thing — that the 
mere fact of a certain occupation's being the 
means of sustenance, is no honest claim for its 
adoption or continuance. I believe every baby 
that's born can make the longer or shorter 
transition from cradle to coffin, decently, hon- 



SETTLING DOWN 121 

estly, and comfortably (relatively speaking), 
by letting their hands find to do only such 
things as are intrinsically good and useful. 
Probably three-quarters of them (the graduates) 
ought to learn a trade or work a farm. I wish 
I could annually take nine-tenths of the law 
candidates and stake them out ("picket" them) 
in a ten-acre lot with a few bags of seed, a hoe, 
and the Bible — there to be left for life. 

I sympathize with your longing at times for 
an ascetic bout with the devil that is in us. 
But we both know (appealing to Philip sober) 
that seven devils would come to the funeral 
of the one smashed one, if we tried it ever so 
thoroughly. So don't let's do it. And so far 
from running away from each other (a part of 
asceticism), let's run into each other all we 
can. . . . 

With the fall he got fairly to work at his 
teaching: — 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., Nov. 8, 1868. 
... I shan't think of the poem till next 
spring, for that is the time when birds pair 
and sing, and poets prepare and ditto. Man 
undergoes a shrinkage and goosefleshiness of 
soul during the fall and winter, and only in 
spring is the rock smitten. Don't you fin<d that 
the inner man takes that occasion to flap its 



122 EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 

wings, and mount all the highest rail-fences of 
the moral world, and do up a year's crowing? 
You mention a " librarian " idea. That 
would have many temptations for me. Often 
I think I am better fitted to deal with books 
than with men. Perhaps I should do well to 
fit myself, as you say, and try for a position. 
Yet I have got the school-iron in the fire now, 
and must wait till 't is thoroughly tried. My 
school is only a country school, and I suppose, 
to answer your question as you meant it, we 
are to only " exist " there, for a while. We are 
to board in the village, however, and shall 
have some little society. Wadsworth is the 
place, and Medina County is the County. 
Near here . . . 

Then there fell a blow from which Sill did 
not recover for many a year — the illness and 
death of his alter ego, Shearer, forecasted in 
the letter from Palmer to which Sill refers : — 

Wadswobth, Ohio, Feb. 7, 1869. 

Dear H , — I enclose a letter from 

California which will tell you its sad news 
better than I can. Palmer is one of my and 
Sex's first and best friends there. Lives at 
Oakland. Do not let any one know about it 
who will be in danger of writing dolorously to 
Sex, or letting him know what we hear from 



SETTLING DOWN 123 

friends there. You will see to that, though, a 
little thing might save or kill him now. We 
must all write jolly letters and often. I should 
go out to him at once if I had means, for it 
almost seems as if a companion, the right one, 
might save him, for he is still able to ride and 
"be diverted. There is no one there who will 
take him and do what ought to be done. I be- 
lieve it could be done. It is the mind that has 
been killing him, not the climate. 
Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

There was evidently a plan for Sill to go 
out to California and look after Shearer: in 
fact Sill all but suggested it in the last letter, 
but it was plainly enough not practicable. 
Between the lines one reads the fine loyal com- 
radeship that united this group of college 
friends : — 

Cuyahoga Falls, Feb. 21, 1869. 

Dear H , — Your three letters, two to 

Cuyahoga Falls and one to Wadsworth, were 
received. ... As it is there is nothing for it 
but to renounce. Perhaps I could not do much 
if I were there, but it seems as though it might 
be won yet. fit is easy enough for a man to 
look death in the face for himself, but for an- 
other, and such a one, it's awful to me. And 



124 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

the idea of a few thousand miles seems nothing 
and paltry for such a stake, — only, can it be 
done? And if the answer is no, what help for 
it? A man may curse or groan according to 
his temperament — neither wisely, I presume. 
So I shall not go, but shall go about my own 
business just as if all were well. And the out- 
look is that I shall not very long survive him, 
only the difference is he would have done 
something and I never should have. I am 
pretty much played out with debating this 
thing. 

Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

The teaching succeeded: he is now in charge 
of the town schools, and can re-read old books ! 

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, Aug. 29, '69. 

I have been meaning to write to you to- 
morrow for ever so long. I have been very busy 
and bothered or 't would have got done. I am 
just settled in winter quarters. We have 
moved to our new boarding-place, rooms at the 
hotel, and this is the first day I have really 
been at home since I saw you. 

I am going to stay here and take the High 
School, superintending the other schools; and 
I have been bustling about getting ready for 
my work. It will be a pretty hard place, but 



SETTLING DOWN 125 

what of that? As Sex always used to write 
me about his own unpleasantnesses, " Quid re- 
fert, Caio?" We have got two very nice little 
rooms, southside with sunshine to order, trees 
contiguous, quiet, and fixed up very pleas- 
antly. . . . 

I have, several times over, been into "Won- 
derland " with Miss Alice. We have found it, 
as you said, the very delightfullest book that 
ever was. He that did it is a genius and a won- 
der himself. The Cheshire Cat, and the Fla- 
mingo neck that would n't do for croquet mal- 
let, the March Hare, and the way the animals 
snubbed and contradicted and confused Alice 
— I never read anything that pleased me so 
much. I think the Mad Tea-Party is the best 
chapter — and for single incidents I believe I 
award the palm to the Cheshire Cat coming 
back to ask if she said Pig or Fig, and consent- 
ing readily to vanish by degrees, leaving the 
grin to the last! The March Hare is the gem 
of the pictures, too, with the King Lear touch 
about his strawy head, and the glare of his 
eye as he crowds the miserable dormouse into 
the teapot. Oh, what a mad book it is! . . . 

Cuyahoga Falls, Sept., 1869. 
I have commenced my school, been run- 
ning a week. "Central High School." 120 
scholars: 2 lady assistants. Latin, Greek, 



126 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

astronomy, music, philosophy, physical geog- 
raphy, chemistry, etc., tapering down to 
infantry, under the assistants fresh from the 
swaddling clothes of the intermediate and 
primary schools. I am "superintendent of 
schools," so my cares are many, as there are 
four primaries besides my own big school. 
So that's "what I am going to do next.". . . 

If , or any other very near-sighted 

scum-skimmer, gives me any dabs that are 
good for anything to me, send me a copy, 
please. But otherwise, abuse is a mere nurse 
of unprofitable egotism. I don't mean to care 
whether any one thinks I can write well or ill, 
so long as I can teach a good school. . . . 

I am very busy, as I said. Plenty of time to 
have thoughts of my friends, as you know in your 
own case. 

Cuyahoga Falls, 0., Nov. 7, '69. 
... I am tugging away at my school, and 
think I did well enough in staying here; though 
the work is almost too much for me. I can see 
enough, every day, for about three like me to 
do. Very likely a larger pattern than me might 
get through the whole of it, but I have to leave 
lots of things undone. I will enclose one of our 
blank reports, to show you how we have to be 
school and college in one; for but few of our 
120 scholars can be got into college, ever, and 



SETTLING DOWN 127 

so must be fed all their little stomachs can 
possibly digest, here and now. 

In one sense a man is an empty windbag 
who pretends to teach all manner of things 
without any thorough or even decent prepara- 
tion; yet it is better, is n't it? that they should 
get some little inkling of how much there is to 
be learned, than turned off on a light lunch of 
arithmetic and orthography. 

Winter has come, and I don't scruple to 
shake my puny fist in his hoary face and call 
him bad names. My voice is still for spring. . . . 

The grumbling of these months is of a 
healthy tone — that of a man who has so much 
to do that the time fails him. 

Dec, '69. 

More to do every day and night than I can 
find minutes and spinal column for. Com- 
fortably off enough except for a thousand sub- 
jects to investigate and questions to be settled 
and no hour for them. I am forced to be 
occupied with details . . . yet chafed at the 
unsettled state of these confounded general 
principles. 

. . . Well, I suppose 't is a good deal illu- 
sion, these fine ideas of what we'd do if some- 
thing was n't just as it is. Blessed is he that 
wants things to be as he has 'em. But where 
is the man? 



128 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

The work in Ohio was absorbing, but hardly 
satisfying. Soon there came a call from Cali- 
fornia — from the high school at Oakland 
where Sill had left warm friends from his earlier 
visit: — 

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, 
Jan. 23, 1870. 

Dear Chief, — I am very glad to have you 
writing to me again about the Oakland matter, 
chiefly because it continues to let me know that 
you would like to have me come back there 
among you. I am queer, I 'm afraid, about my 
way of looking (or not looking) at future plans. 
Whether it springs most from faith, or a Mus- 
sulman sort of "fatality" despair of individual 
planning and trying, I let the future alone more 
than most seem to : perhaps too much. Except 
as it affects the convenience of others who may 
hinge more or less on our edges, I don't see 
much advantage in taking thought far ahead, 
especially as to details. 

I would like to have a window opened 
through which I might get a draft of fresh com- 
munion with the lives of you folks there. . . . 
Strange that on such a great planet, alive with 
us, our thoughts and loves and sympathies 
should just cluster a half-dozen here and a 
half-dozen there, and count all the "world," so 
far as we care, on our fingers. 



SETTLING DOWN 129 

I suppose we are reading the same tele- 
graphic news, every day, and hearing the same 
topics talked, and the wives are playing the 
identical pieces on the pretty-much-identical 
pianos (only ours is out of tune at present) and 
so on. . . . 

With the return of summer and its compara- 
tive leisure, we find our poet again communing 
with himself: — 

June, 1870. 

Once in a while there seems to come a sort 
of eddy in the rush of my thoughts about my 
school, which leaves me to think of things in 
general, the future, etc. Such an one appears to 
have come this Sunday morning, perhaps in 
compensation for a night full of feverish dreams 
about classes and plans for scholars. And my 
eyes turn, first thing, of course, out your way; 
and the question is, can I manage it to come 
there? . . . 

I wish, if you get time to write me "so large 
a letter with your own hand" as I hope, you 
would put in a word or two on your religious 
status nowadays. We have both been thinking, 
reading, etc., since a word has been said. For 
my part I long to "fall in" with somebody. 
This picket duty is monotonous. I hanker after 
a shoulder on this side and the other. I can't 
agree in belief (or expressed belief — Lord 



130 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

knows what the villains really think, at home) 
with the "Christian "people, nor in spirit with 
the Radicals, etc. . . . Many, here and there, 
must be living the right way, doing their best, 
hearty souls, and I 'd like to go 'round the world 
for the next year and take tea with them in 
succession. Would n't you? 

This chapter, in which Sill finds himself and 
actually takes up his livelihood, may be very 
appropriately closed with a fragment wherein 
he chews the cud of bitter and sweet reflection 
and comes to a wholly false conclusion: — 

Dec, 1870. 
If I were to commence any prose, for sample, 
I believe I would take up and recount the things 
that befell a man who had been so unfortunate 
as to inspire his friends, early in life, with great 
expectations of him. What woes it caused him 
and them, when they repeatedly touched him 
off as a rocket, and he infallibly came down like 
a stick. I suppose that if taken young and 
trained right I might have made a writer; but 
the training has certainly been wanting. I have 
got myself, by dint of nearly killing labor, into 
the shape of an almost tolerable schoolmaster, 
but higher than that I never shall get, till the 
resurrection. 



VI 

TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 

The second sojourn in California, covering 
the twelve years from 1871 to 1883, formed the 
largest block in the structure of Sill's life. The 
invitation foreshadowed in the letter from Mr. 
Palmer came, and was accepted, and in 1871 
Sill began his work as teacher of English in the 
high school at Oakland, across the bay from 
San Francisco. There he taught until 1874, 
when he accepted the chair of English in the 
University of California at Berkeley, a neigh- 
boring suburb of San Francisco. 

Sill was chosen Professor of English at the 
young university — then being set on its feet 
by Daniel C. Gilman, who was drawn away not 
long thereafter to organize Johns Hopkins, — 
and so had the rare distinction of laying the 
foundations of two American universities 
both of which have already grown great. The 
acquaintance between Sill and Gilman grew 
into a friendship which lasted until Sill's un- 
timely death. 

The three years at Oakland were crowded 
with work — the absorbing, consuming work 
which teaching becomes to the enthusiast like 



132 EDWAKD ROWLAND SILL 

Sill. So he wrote little poetry and few letters, 
and these chiefly about problems connected 
with his teaching. Such is one to his classmate 
Williams at New Haven: — 

Oakland, Cal., Oct. 18, 1871. 

Is there any tendency shown in Yale to 
lessen the amount of Greek required for ad- 
mission, or any talk of teaching that language, 
in connection with comparative philology (or 
some hints at it) by lectures to juniors and 
seniors? 

There is a growing idea out here that such 
a change should be made. I don't like to leave 
off my Greek (I have learned it, since leaving 
college, and taught it), but I've a suspicion 
that the reformers are right in claiming that 
more might be done at it by the right sort of 
lectures than by the excessive cramming of the 
raw material of Greek culture as at present. 

I think the university here would change, if 
it got any aid and comfort from the Eastern 
sisters. Will it get it? If not, I must make our 
high school more Greekish, in the teeth of its 
principal and public opinion. Latin they take 
pretty easily, but are restive under Bouheva 
or Avw ("Woman's Greek, without the ac- 
cents"). 

The question is, would n't it have been bet- 
ter for you and me to have had German and 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 133 

French before College, than lectures on Greek 
culture, etc., with general language, during 
college? . . . 

The return to California meant a renewal 
of old friendships and a revival of his old love 
for that marvellous country which counts him 
among its prophets. Glimpses of it run through 
his poems, early and late. He had sung it in 
his poem, always a favorite with Californians, 
"Man the Spirit," written in 1865: — 

"In this fair land, whose fields he robed in bloom, 
A living poem bound in blue and gold; 
With azure flowers like little specks of sky 
Fallen, tangled in the dew-drops, to the grass, 
And orange ones — as if the wealth below 
Had blossomed up in beaten flakes of gold." 

And again in "The Hermitage": — 

"The land where summers never cease 
Their sunny psalm of light and peace; 
Whose moonlight, poured for years untold, 
Has drifted down in dust of gold : 
Whose morning splendors, fallen in showers, 

Leave ceaseless sunrise in the flowers." 

r 

Oakland, where now he went to live, and 
the bay drew his tribute again and again: — 

"Beyond, long curves of little shallow waves 
Creep, tremulous with ripples, to the shore 
Till the whole bay seems slowly sliding in, 
With edge of snow that melts against the sand." 

The almost constant bloom and incredible 



134 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

profusion of flowers stirred his fancy. In "April 
in Oakland" lie writes: — 

"Was there last night a snow-storm 
So thick the orchards stand 
With drift on drift of blossom-flakes 
Whitening all the land." 

And in "The Hermitage": — 

"An April, fairer than the Atlantic June, 
Whose calendar of perfect days was kept 
By daily blossoming of some new flower." 

An impression naturally deepened by a re- 
turn to Eastern winter : — 

"Ah, give me back the clime I know, 
Where all the year geraniums blow, 
And hyacinth buds bloom white for snow." 

Sill's three years at Oakland in the high 
school were years of intense toil — a sort of 
sacrificial service as if he would spend himself 
upon this task of teaching leaving no sinew 
unstrained. 

His reward was as much in the moral as in 
the intellectual quickening he communicated 
to his students. One of his students, Miss 
Millicent Shinn, has left a record of the effect 
of his teaching; and that this was no isolated 
case, the outpouring of similar testimony at 
the Memorial Meeting in 1887 abundantly 
showed : — 

"It was as if he had carried into the school- 
room the same ideals that would have taken 




EDWARD R. SILL, 1872 



TEACHING IN CALIFOENIA 135 

him into the pulpit. He was full of it, — at 
every turn in the day's work he referred every- 
thing to ideal standards, — duty, and eternity, 
and man's chief end. It was like having a very 
religious person teaching children, except that 
having no stable religious creed, he gave to all 
he said of ideal aims the spontaneity and ardor 
of original feelings, experiences wrought out 
on his own lines. A negligent lesson was apt 
to be rebuked with reminders (evidently fully 
felt) that we were forming our characters, and 
perhaps for more than this life: * You are work- 
ing out your eternal destinies now,' he would 
say. He filled the schoolroom with the ardor 
and poetic elevation of the idea of Duty as in 
Wordsworth's ode, — and his rigid applica- 
tions of it made it no mere poetry to us, 
either, but a * stern daughter of the Voice of 
God,' too. 

"He was fond of bringing any great idea, all 
his own chief topics of spiritual meditation, to 
the schoolroom. The object of human exist- 
ence, the summum bonum, the chief end of 
man, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, 
the service of humanity, the ideals of mediaeval 
chivalry, of Hale's Ten Times One, were every- 
day subjects to us." 

From Miss Shinn also I have these jottings 
on Sill's personal relations with his students: 
"He was in the habit of having little talks with 



136 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

pupils, — at recess, or at odd minutes in school; 
and often asked them to come tohis house for 
this or that, — to get a book, try a piece of 
music with Mrs. Sill, etc.; and most of them 
thought, when they found a new flower or bug, 
or a striking passage in a book, that they must 
needs take it to show him. He concerned him- 
self about our outside affairs, — music-lessons, 
eye-strain, etc. Yet he was not the sort of 
teacher who goes out and plays with the boys, 
helps in the organization of clubs, etc. He al- 
ways, with all his easy freedom of manner, 
kept a distance, and an authority. He en- 
couraged us to talk freely, to argue back and 
criticise, and would take more of that than any 
teacher I ever knew; but he drew strict lines, 
and never permitted an impertinence, never 
laughed with the boys good-naturedly in a joke 
against himself (which, indeed, they scarcely 
ventured upon) ; and in any real case of discip- 
line, his voice was always for severity. He was 
not ordinarily sarcastic in the schoolroom; but 
either pert smartness or deliberate neglect of 
a duty would bring a crushing contempt into 
his manner and speech sometimes, — more his 
manner than his speech, for I do not recall 
especially sharp things that he said. He would 
not sit and labor through an ill-learned lesson; 
he would throw down the book contemptuously 
and refuse to hear it. He explained much less 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 137 

than teachers I see nowadays, and expected us 
to dig out most of our difficulties for ourselves. 
For dishonesty he had no mercy, but that was 
practically unknown in the school in his day." 

"Once," Miss Shinn adds, "he and Mrs. Sill 
took me with them to hear Booth and McCul- 
lough in 'Lear' — my first play: and after it 
was over Mr. Sill asked me if I wanted to cry 
anywhere: I said I did very much when Lear 
recognized Cordelia. He said, 'That was the 
place where I had to look away and begin study- 
ing my neighbors' behavior very hard.' " 

In a letter of Professor Royce, who was Sill's 
assistant in the Department of English at the 
University, there is a bit of reminiscence which 
illustrates the spirit Sill brought to his teach- 
ing:— 

"Once I found him very gloomy. His work 
at Berkeley was wearing him out, and certain 
of his worst pupils, to whose interests he had 
been showing his usual unsparing devotion, 
had just been paining him by bitter speeches 
and cruel misunderstandings. I gossiped on 
about the affair to him, in an irresponsible 
way, of course, until among other things I said : 
'You see, Sill, all this comes from your deter- 
mined fashion of casting pearls before swine. 
Why will you always do it?' 'Ah, Royce,' he 
responded, with a perfectly simple and calm 
veracity in his gentle voice, 'you never know 



138 EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 

in this world whether you were really casting 
pearls at all until you feel the tusks.' " 

But no better expression of Sill's ideal in 
teaching can, I fancy, be found than the un- 
published notes of a talk to his high school 
class shortly before leaving Oakland to take the 
post at the university. It came to me in pencil, 
having been found after his death among his 
papers, probably preserved as a memento: — 

"I cannot feel that this is a common time. 
Either because of the direction my own thoughts 
and feelings have lately taken, in attempting to 
guide yours, or the thoughts I have had about 
each one of you, or the thoughts you your- 
selves have expressed, or a something which 
I have seen shadowed forth on your faces, or 
glimmering in your eyes from time to time 
lately — this or something else has filled me 
with the sense of an unusual potency and 
import in this particular point of your lives. 
When I look at you, it is as if I looked out on 
the dim, misty spaces of the dawn of a new 
creation, and as if I saw vague shapes of un- 
known possibilities forming and dissolving 
and re-forming before me, and as if as of old the 
spirit of God were moving on the face of the 
waters. The air seems astir with prophetic in- 
timations. It is as if I heard the voices of 
awakening souls questioning the universe in 
which they have just awakened, questioning 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 139 

themselves, turning from their past with con- 
tempt, or sorrow, or anger, or ridicule, or pity 
— turning to their future with hope, or wonder, 
or growing purpose. 

"It may be only my imagination: but it 
seems to me the whole air is electrical with it 
lately — with this casting-off of old chrysalis 
husks, and the awakening rhythm of spiritual 
wings. 

"Let us consider for a little, what it is we are 
doing, or what we may do, if we will. 

"There are three most momentous events 
that come in most people's lives : the birth into 
this mystery of life, out of that other preceding 
mystery, of which we have not even a gleam: 
the birth out of this life, into whatever mystery 
is to come: and between them, at some point, 
that time — that day — that morning or that 
mid-day — or evening — when the soul makes 
its one final irrevocable choice of what its life 
and what itself shall be. 

"I do not think one always knows, at the 
time, what is being decided, or what has been 
decided. It may come casually, in some quiet 
moment of watching a cloud, or a bird, or a 
star — it may come after a strong logical 
wrestling between duty and desire — it may 
come slowly, day after day, as the good green 
grass in spring, or it may come like a thunder- 
flash out of a passionate storm of tears and 



140 EDWARD ROWLAND] SILL 

prayer — but come it will, to most of us. Before 
it, our days are aimless, useless, unsatisfactory, 
if not worse — after it, we have a motive for 
what we do, and a satisfaction in what is done. 
Before it, the soul's flight is only the haphazard 
fluttering of an insect, — afterward, it is the 
swift, sure flight of the bird, that seeks its own 
tree-top and sings upon its way. 

" Most men have no ruling purpose. It may 
be so with some of you, but with some I know 
it is not true. Individually, in your own 
secret souls, I believe you have made choices 
that if carried out will blossom and bear fruit 
in good lives. But it is not quite enough that 
this is true of us separately and secretly: I 
wish we might in some way be more than a 
group of separate, self-contained individuals 
in this. I cannot ask you to talk much about 
this, in any personal way. There is an instinc- 
tive delicacy that forbids it. But I wish that 
by some sudden revelation of each self to each 
other, each might know that every one of 
us was from this time forth devoted to a high 
ideal. I do not believe much in vows, or excited 
avowals — but I wish that in some sudden 
flash of insight, some answering eye-glance of 
mutual understanding, each might say in his 
heart — 'Here are others, who, like me, are 
disgusted and ashamed with what they have 
been, have done, have left undone, and who, 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 141 

like me, are steadying themselves among the 
strong waves of circumstance, like ships in a 
pent sea, and steering their course by the same 
stars that I, too, look up to.' And we all belong 
to a larger company of other times and places. 
Many have striven to attain ideals; they are 
of many different ages and climes. The com- 
pany of the heroic souls of history are the real 
Round Table, and their king is that blameless 
man to whose law of love they have all, in one 
way or another, been loyal. And that Round 
Table, why may we not all join? 

"The old world goes on, day after day; with 
much mixture of toil and suffering and injus- 
tice and foolishness in it. Life in it does n't 
seem a very great or valuable affair. No wonder 
so many throw it away, not caring to live out 
even the few winters and summers that might 
be allotted to them. But it often seems to me 
it might be such a glorious old world if some of 
us would conspire together to make it so. What 
a beautiful earth it is! What splendor in the 
mornings of it — the sunrises, the clearings 
away after rain, the moonrises, the superb dis- 
tances, the hill colors, the elastic spring of mus- 
cular strength, the power of thinking, of re- 
membering, the confidence we can put in each 
other, the help and services we can render 
each other, the love we can give, and get. — It 
seems a splendid earth to live on. If only we 



142 EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 

always lived up to the level of our best mo- 
^ments ! 

"How are we to do this? I have no revela- 
tion to give, no secret wisdom, in answer to 
this. I can only give expression, as one of you, 
to the question. But there are some things I 
feel sure would help us, and one is, let us get 
help from other lives. We can find out how 
others have lived, and what they have tried to 
do, and how they have succeeded. These people 
of whom we read in books have been, after all, 
just like us. The wiser people get, the more they 
say they discover how much they are like every 
one else. The child thinks nobody ever was like 
him — he looks out on other people, and es- 
pecially on people of past times, as being a dif- 
ferent sort of creatures. Nobody ever had just 
his feelings, or just his expectations. By and 
by he discovers that each child of them all has 
had just that thought about the rest. It is 
likely that such a person as Abraham Lincoln, 
for instance, or Mrs. Browning, or Socrates, 
had at one time or another every single thought 
and every single mood and feeling, that you 
have had. It is probable that you have never 
had an emotion, a desire, a temptation, a wish, 
which has not been in each other mind here. 
How else could we understand each other? 
Let us draw what inspiration we can, then, 
from the man and woman — the immortal girls 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 143 

and boys, that have trodden these earth-ways 
before us. When you look at Sirius, or the 
Pleiades, or the Great Dipper to-night, try to 
think how those other souls have age after 
age looked up at those same twinkling lights, 
and had the same thought, or the same ques- 
tion, or the same vacancy, in their human 
heart as they looked with just such eyes, and 
turned away with just such footsteps as yours. 

"And one more suggestion; if we are so much 
alike, let us help each other. Don't let us be 
ashamed of what is best in us. Let us not any 
longer pretend we are superficial and shallow 
all the time. If we have feelings and thoughts 
on other subjects than the trifles we generally 
chat about, let us frankly speak them out. The 
wisest and profoundest people, when we come 
to learn about them, seem to talk most freely 
about beauty, and truth, and love, and earnest 
things. It is only children and childish people 
who are afraid or ashamed to be themselves. 
The telegraph brought us yesterday the last 
conversation that Sumner had with the emi- 
nent men, lawyers and statesmen and judges, 
that were with him; and one of the last things 
he said was, 'Tell Emerson that I love and 
revere him.' 

"Which of you would feel free to write the 
same of anybody or anything and read it here? 
Yet what is it but a childish falling-in with 



144 EDWAKD ROWLAND SILL 

shallow custom of shallow people that should 
prevent. 

"Am I mistaken, or has not the time come 
when we are talking to ourselves, and do not 
care either if we say it aloud, — saying : ' Soul 
of mine, you have not been all that you might. 
You have neither done for yourself, nor for 
others, what you might yet do, if you would. 
You have kept your best feelings hidden. You 
have like a coward showed of yourself only 
what others were showing of themselves and 
done only what others expected of you. You 
have been cowardly, and foolish, and worth- 
less and conceited. Rise up, and from this 
hour live out your true self, modestly, courage- 
ously — and let this base, timid, indolent, self- 
ish body in which you live, be not your mas- 
ter, but your loyal servant for all noble ends.' 

"Some such thing as this I believe every one 
of these greater souls of whom we read must 
have thought, at some such hour as this. There 
must have been in the lives of Socrates and Lin- 
coln and Washington, probably in their boy- 
hood, a decisive hour, when from that time on 
they might have been only common creatures. 
But the heroic soul rose in them equal to the 
hour, and their lives became immortal types of 
goodness and greatness. 

"I suggest to you as the best motive I can 
find : a life for the service of others. I offer you 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 145 

the motto which a Saxon knight of old time 
used to bear on his shield, 'Ich Dien' — I 
serve." 

The talk, which was given in classroom, 
called forth various responses in letters and 
compositions and to at least one of them Sill 
wrote a reply : — 

Oakland, March 23, '74. 
Monday Noon. 

Dear Millie, — Then, too, if we should 
decide on service as the principal thing, the 
question arises: of what sort? Shall it be like 
the washing of the feet, or the dying on the 
cross? That is, — the small common helpful- 
nesses and services chiefly, or some special 
great absorbing service. Shall we let our lives 
run along in apparent insignificance, in chan- 
nels others dig for them, — mere irrigating 
trenches, — or cut their own channels, under 
guidance of some idea of our own — great if 
possible, good certainly, and at least our own. 
. . . Somebody wrote to me, " Why don't you 
stop trying to make something of other people, 
and make something of yourself?" Which will 
you do? They are hardly compatible. Sup- 
posing the same amount of good to others from 
either way, is there not an additional grain of 
good in the greater abnegation of self involved 
in the washing the feet theory? 

May one not look at it in this way : to be all 



146 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

we might includes " character " as perhaps its 
highest part (considered in the light of immor- 
tality, as security for gains of all sorts in the 
future: as basis therefor, and essential condi- 
tion : certainly the highest part) : now it is so 
necessary to the highest character to serve 
others: to bear one's cross, as well as to be 
lifted up on it: to renounce, for others' sake: 
that the gain is always more than the loss, even 
if we gave up ten years of study and thought to 
tend some bed-ridden cripple, whose highest 
want seemed only a cool cup of water now and 
then. 

Well, one thing is certain : we can seek the 
highest and best and truest we know: under 
guidance of half a dozen good motives: no 
matter if they be inextricably mixed; and no 
irreparable loss if even some bad ones insist on 
mixing in with them. 

Is it certain that the reason is in all ways 
higher than the emotions? Perhaps they can- 
not be compared wisely : any more than a yard 
and a color. Love seems to me a pretty high 
thing. I suspect that to say a certain motive is 
based on love, is not saying it is any lower than 
one based on logic. 

As Mr. says, one would n't like to 

have to choose whether he would prefer to have 
the oxygen or the nitrogen taken out of his 
atmosphere. 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 147 

We get a prejudice against the emotions, 
when we see them acting regardless of reason; 
and against calculation, when it is cold and 
emotionless. How if they both go streaming in 
one current, like the light and the air? 

I like it that there are some subjects on 
which, when one has said anything, he has 
after all said nothing at all. 

The Oakland period can perhaps hardly be 
better closed than by another reminiscence of 
Miss Shinn to whom the record of those years 
owes so much : — 

"When I was a schoolgirl, my mother 
was speaking somewhat anxiously of the care 
needed in environing young people; and Mr. 
Sill said, 'Well, I suppose so; yet I often think 
that a young soul, if it is only a truthful soul, 
might safely enough be tossed off anywhere in 
the universe, — sent off at a tangent into space, 
— and will come out all right/ — 'I should 
want to know what a young soul was going to 
come into contact with, before I sent it spin- 
ning off that way, if it was any one dear to me/ 
said my mother, a little concerned. — ' Come 
in contact with God's good worlds, anyhow/ 
said Mr. Sill, dropping the subject by rising to 
move about, as he often did. I do not know 
quite how much he meant by the phrase; per- 
haps only to avoid further pressing of the 



148 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

point; but it struck me at sixteen as poetic and 
lofty, and gave me a sort of feeling of safety 
and intellectual courage." 



THE UNIVERSITY 

Sill began his work as Professor of English in 

the University of California in 1875, when he 

was thirty-four, full of ardent enthusiasm and 

eagerness to teach. It was a moralizing, New 

England, proselyting zeal that inspired him — 

akin to that which he had expressed in "Man 

the Spirit": — 

"Here 
Upon a coast whose calmer-blossoming surf 
Beats not with such an iron clang as theirs, 
We plant the Newer England; this our word, 
That man is no mere spider -like machine 
To spin out webs of railroads after him 
In all earth's corners, nor a crafty brain 
Made to knit cunning nets of politics 
Or sharpen down to insignificance 
On the grinding wheels of business, but a Soul, 
That travelling higher worlds in upper light 
Dips down through bodily contact into this." 

Need enough there was of it; for California 
was "practical," materialistic, Philistine. Sill 
did what he could to stem the tide, and while 
he was at the university, letters never lacked a 
champion nor the life of the spirit an exponent. 
Some there will be to regret that he did not 
give himself wholly to letters, leaving pedagogy 



TEACHING IN CALIFOENIA 149 

to others. He was, of course, first and last a 
man of letters, and say as loud and often as he 
liked that he was "only a school teacher who 
occasionally wrote verses," he probably knew 
in his moments of insight that the pen was his 
true weapon and the written word his deed. So 
long as he was teaching, however, he gave him- 
self manfully to his teaching, writing but little 
poetry and very few letters except to students 
either in tutelage or out of the academic nest and 
themselves grappling with the teacher's task. 

The letters and fragments of letters which 
follow are taken from the "Memorial Volume " 
issued in California in 1887, the originals no 
longer obtainable and the very names of the 
recipients unknown for the most part. Full of 
preaching they are. "We plant the Newer 
England!" 

"I hope you are not trying to do any brain- 
work. Let your brains vegetate and make new 
growth undisturbed, for next term! — there's 
so much I shall ask you to do. Mind you, I 
know about brains. The thing you want now 
till term opens is absolute stupidity, and great 
activity in the digestive apparatus. Horrid, 
is n't it! Item, so much carbon; item, so much 
nitrogen: 'five forms of protoplasm': muscular 
exercise to distribute them well about the tis- 
sues. Then, next term, we will enter upon our 



150 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

birthright as * heirs of all the ages ' and the ' long 
result of time.'" 

"Your question of 26th May was too good a 
one to leave so long unanswered. It was not 
left as being too hard to answer, but I have 
been very busy, and really could not find time 
to settle myself to say anything on so import- 
ant a question till to-night, and now it must be 
a brief note. The real value of * being well read ' 
seems to me to be in the wider and truer life it 
gives us. By 'wider' I mean that our thoughts 
and feelings and purposes are more complex 
and more consonant with the complexity and 
manifoldness of the universe we live in: the 
microcosm gets a little — even if a very little 
— nearer in quality and quantity to the 
macrocosm. The crystal leads such a narrow 
life — just along one little line — a single law 
of facet and angle : the plant a little wider : the 
fish a little wider: and the different sorts of 
people widening and widening out in their inner 
activities — and much according to their read- 
ing (since living, human contact is not possible, 
except with the few relatives and neighbors). 

"And by truer life, I mean truer to nature: 
more as we were meant to be: the inner rela- 
tions, between ideas, corresponding closer to 
the other relations — or 'real' relations — be- 
tween things. These real thing-relations are in 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 151 

fact very complex and vastly inclusive : so must 
the thoughts and feelings be, if 'true,' or truly 
correspondent or mirror-like to them. 

"I don't see that culture (unless you spell it 
wrong) needs — or tends at all — to cut one 
off from human warmth. Are not some of the 
* best-read' people you know or hear of, some 
of the broadest-hearted also? The very essence 
of culture is shaking off the nightmare of self- 
consciousness and self-absorption and attaining 
a sort of Christian Nirvana — lost in the great 
whole of humanity: thinking of others, caring 
for others, admiring and loving others. 

"I should like to have you write me more 
fully about it sometime." 

"If you have a shadow of suspicion that your 
own manner . . . may be at fault (or at misfor- 
tune), pray endeavor to change it. We must 
accommodate ourselves to the imperfect na- 
tures of people, just as they have to to ours. 
No man can be just his natural, unrestrained 
self, without impinging too much. Angles col- 
lide with angles. 'Suspect yourself is a great 
aid towards getting along with people. It's the 
littleness of our natures that lets us stand on 
our rights so much as we constantly do. I sup- 
pose the great men stood chiefly on their duties, 
instead. Et ego have been knocked and rubbed 
a good deal; but in the retrospect it seems to 



152 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

have been mainly my own fault or unwisdom. 
Jesus would have 'got along' pretty smoothly 
with nearly everybody. Even the whip in the 
temple is said to have been for the cattle, not 
their sellers. 

" Of course charity is not to blind our judg- 
ment; but only to enlighten it. Exempli gratia, 
I have some little charity for the present Legis- 
lature. Nevertheless, my judgment is that they 
are largely knaves and fools. Still, at this dis- 
tance, I can recognize some of them as fellow- 
critters. But what a mess they are making of 
educational matters. . . . 

"If you ever get thinking too much about 
yourself, and your own concerns, read 'King 
Lear,' or 'As You Like It,' or 'Hamlet': — 
taking the whole play at a sitting or two. 

"It is a great pity that in making plans, etc., 
one has to think so much about one's self. 
Beware, my dear child, of too much — or too 
exclusive — interest in yourself, and your own 
inner experiences. Make sensible plans for 
yourself, and then go at their fulfilment, for- 
getting yourself (one can, since all plans are for 
work of some kind, and that may all be from 
within outward. Even reading and study and 
thought and writing — are so) . Have you read 
Spencer's 'Ethics'? Better do so. (Did you 
read Emerson on the 'Sovereignty of Ethics' in 
'North American Review,' May, '77?) Spencer 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 153 

has a very sharp passage on Carlyle, but who 
has expressed the protest against egoism so 
well — so 'very salt and bitter and good' — as 
he in the second part of * Sartor Resartus ' (that 
part — the autobiographical part — though he 
pretends it is not auto — is worth reading over, 
even if you have n't lately.) " 

"Here are a few points of advice from a 
veteran, which I wish you not only to read, but 
to solemnly adhere to : — 

" 1. Don't care in the faintest possible degree 
what the children think of your doings. (You 
may think as much as you please of what they 
care for. They have tender little hearts.) 

"2. Don't try to do (or have them) two 
days' work in one. Little by little, and the 
least things first, and many times repeated. 

"3. Their education consists mainly in their 
working: not yours. Sometimes the teachers 
that work hardest do the poorest work, on 
that very account. (Your work out of school, of 
course, helps them : but I mean, in.) 

"4. If you find yourself getting excited, or 
talking loud, or moving quickly (i.e., hurriedly) 
just stop, and let the steam go down. Give the 
children something to do quietly, as a composi- 
tion on 'What I should like to have,' or some- 
thing, meantime. 

"5. Go to bed early, after giving yourself a 



154 EDWAKD ROWLAND SILL 

rubbing, to get the blood out of your brain into 
your skin and muscles. 

"6. Keep warm: every minute, day and 
night. Be sure you are clothed warmly enough 
for that climate, especially when winter comes. 

"7, 8, 9, and 10. Never allow yourself to 
think of what you have been doing; during the 
day, for instance. It is the going over things in 
the head afterwards, that kills. Throw your 
mind off from a thing, when it is done, and look 
only forward, planning the next thing. All 
night, for example, think about the next day's 
work, not the past one. This rule is worth 
everything. 

"You will feel queer, perhaps, for a day or 
two or three, but will soon like it and enjoy 
yourself." 

"Truly it would be pleasanter for you to be 
teaching with me . . . but perhaps not so good 
for you after all. That which teaches us most, 
is the best for us. I often wish, myself, that I 
were in some 'loveliest village of the vale,' with 
an old wooden schoolhouse and a parcel of bare- 
foot urchins; with a little stream to fish in, and 
a long meadow to see sunsets from, and a little 
old church where I might hear a country choir 
and doze o' summer afternoons. But better 
not. And so with you. . . . 

"It is good, also, to be alone for a while. 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 155 

That's the bitterest medicine one ever has to 
take, but we need it. So peg away at the small 
duties of these days. A good many of us have 
had very similar experiences, translated into 
different languages of circumstances and par- 
ticular individuals, but the same in pur- 
port. . . . 

"Don't let any more of the molehills seem 
mountains than you can help. *Who cares?' 
is a good nightcap. 

"Think how dreadful it must be to be such 
people as we wot of. What is anything they 
can do to others, compared with that ?" 

"Your letter of 20th was received yesterday, 
on my return from a horseback ride with Mr. 
McLean, up through Napa and Sonoma. I 
sent you a paper from Napa, by the way ... it 
contains a couple of spirited pictures. Don't 
you like those frogs, with the moonshine on 
their slippery legs? and the walrus picture is 
good. I think I should quietly substitute any 
such for the villainous ones which may be 
among those you speak of on the walls. I used 
to put up newspaper pictures on my school- 
house walls, for lack of finer ones. Children 
absorb so much through the eye. . . . 

"You are right about the geography class. 
Give them all the physical, I should say to- 
gether. Skip much of the other geography, 



156 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

having them learn only the principal things, 
and those with great thoroughness. Outline 
map recitations : pointing to rivers, great cities, 
etc., and stimulating them (a large class of 
mixed grades can do it) to quick accurate an- 
swers — the best thing. . . . Get the class to 
take an imaginary voyage with you down a 
river, or along a coast, or so forth (in a balloon 
over a country, say). Then each in turn de- 
scribes what they see. Play we have come to 
such and such a town: what costumes; * ex- 
ports'; trees and plants; climate, etc. . . . 

"You will get along very well, I think, with 
your little flock. Your big boys won't trouble 
you much. If either of them should, be firm 
as a rock. He must do as you say, or leave. 
You must remember that you are not only 
hired by that deestrick, but by the State of 
California. . . . You have the Governor and 
Supreme Court and Legislature at your back 
for support, provided you do just right. . . . 
But I've no idea they will offend. They are 
coarse enough, no doubt; but a good deal of it is 
superficial. At heart they have good about 
them. Every one had a mother. Half of these 
students are just as bad, under the surface. You 
or I are bad enough, if it comes to that. We 
must n't be squeamish : physicians (moral and 
mental, as well as physical) have to stand some 
things that are offensive. You must take 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 157 

things right by the horns. Don't allow any- 
thing bad for fear of speaking of it. Take your 
sinners one by one, however. Never chide in 
public, if you can help it. . . . See the good in 
your children, all you can." 

"I am very glad you have the lovely things 
to look at, in sky and mountain. We could 
hardly get on otherwise. With those, and a few 
human beings whom we believe in and trust, 
and these both as prophetic intimations of 
something beyond, higher than either — we 
can do very well — even if they fry the steak, 
and the grammar class seems panta konis, 
panta ouden. 

"I wish I could help you in some way. I can 
only send my sympathy, and urge you to do all 
you can for the children, regardless of their 
defects of breeding, the disagreeableness of 
their parentage, etc. ... If you can help one or 
two of them ever so little: or even make them 
happier — the cup of cold water, you know : 
there is a good deal in that." 

"You should be writing a good deal, in odd 
moments. Send me anything that's good — 
after it gets cold : — so that you need n't feel 
that it's going to be sent while writing; for 
what we all need is to keep clear of restraining 
influences — these obscure, subtle ones, that 



158 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

throw us out of rapport with ourselves, and 
make us think of the writing instead of the 
thing to be written. I believe we could all of us 
write something worth while if we could get 
free from everything but the looking clearly at 
the inner thing we are trying (or should be) to 
transcribe." 

"If your brain wheels run on . . . give them 
some good important grist to grind: as, a new 
book — or a bit of natural science (natural 
science is a good healthy inanity to relieve the 
brain with, any time), or some French (e.g., 
'Katia,' a Russian story, by Tolstoy, translated 
into French) . Take this rule for yourself : — 

THINK OF THE LARGEST THINGS (among all that 

come through your brain, hour by hour) and 
those that have the least reference to yourself. 
You'd much better be thinking about the 
explorations in Assyria, and act in your per- 
sonal affairs from momentary common sense 
and instinct, than to neglect all these world- 
interests and be planning, be reminiscing about 
some small personal relation or piece of con- 
duct." A personal glimpse from Miss Shinn's 
diary supplements these scraps of letters. 

"Mrs. Sill got her little dog, Twinkle, that 
afternoon, — I do not remember whence, — 
a spaniel puppy; she called him Twinkle later, 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 159 

because the white spot at the end of his tail 
twinkled so. She called to Mr. Sill to come and 
see him as soon as he got home, and I heard him 
say, 'Where's Millie? Has she seen him?' 
They were both much taken up with the puppy, 
and she said that if Ben ate up her little dog, 
Mr. Sill would have to dispose of Ben. The three 
of us played with or held him most of the even- 
ing; and then Mr. Sill spent a long time over 
him, putting him to bed; the puppy would cry 
when left alone, and Mr. Sill would come back 
and fuss over him; at last he got a hot-water 
bag, and put it just under the straw in the box, 
and the puppy snuggled down to it and stopped 
crying at once. Mr. Sill came and told me that 
we 'had a good joke on that little dog; he thought 
it was his mother.' Then he took his wife out- 
doors to look at the stars, and by and by came 
and asked me if I knew what time it was, and 
told me it was a quarter before eleven. I urged 
that I had not finished my work, saying that 
I found the Epistles slower reading than the 
Odes. He said the Epistles were interesting, 
however. Then I called his attention to a large 
and uncanny insect which had settled on my 
wall, above the door; he stepped inside to look 
at it, and exclaimed at it. 'I should think you 
would put him out!' I said I was afraid to. 
'You'd rather put him out than have him in, 
would n't you?' he said; he then went off and 



160 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

got a brush, saying, 'Who'll put him out? 
Little Johnny Stout,' knocked the creature 
out into the dining-room and shut my door, 
saying, 'Good-night.' But he stayed in the 
next room some time himself, petting and 
feeding and talking to the little dog. 

"The puppy occupied them off and on much 
of Sunday; but in the afternoon we took a walk; 
and as we came back to the house, Mr. Sill said, 
'Betty, do you know the people who live here? ' 

— 'I've met them,' she said, 'but I don't think 
much of them.' — 'The man's a queer sort of 
fellow,' he said; 'I've met him a few times.' — 
* He does n't have much to say to you, does he? ' 

— 'No. — I guess he has n't much to say.' — 
I think such whimsical speeches as this were 
with Mr. Sill an expression of that sudden 
sense of externality to one's self that comes 
over people of a metaphysical bent at times." 

The same friend has jotted down some re- 
miniscential impressions of Sill's personality 
during that period : — 

"When I think of Mr. Sill when he was not de- 
pressed or absent-minded, I think of a gentle, 
pervasive brightness, a quick, humorous ap- 
preciation of everything, a light quaintness and 
original and whimsical turn of speech and be- 
havior, which kept one amused when with him, 
and kept the atmosphere of his house alluring. 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 161 

It was like all the other charming traits in his 
personality, a good deal in the vivid yet subtle 
response of his voice and manner and face to 
his mood, — the lighting-up of his eye, the 
confidential and delightful tone of voice with 
which he took you into the joke, — something 
flattering, intimate, whole-hearted, and friendly 
about it. Certainly, he was never one to 'keep 
the table in a roar,' to be the centre of a laugh- 
ing circle, — it would have shut him up 
promptly. 

"If there had been anything nervous or 
abrupt about his manner, I think Mr. Sill 
might have been called a restless man in his 
ways at home. He did not seclude himself in 
a study and work for hours together; he would 
get up and go and attend to this or that; he 
passed to and fro often; would come, perhaps 
twice or three times in the evening, to ask a 
question, show a book or picture, go to look at 
the weather, to see the puppy, etc. He did not 
sit down for a long talk, but would exchange a 
few sentences and off again. When smoking 
with a man friend, or when off on a long walk, 
there would sometimes be long talks, but rarely 
under other conditions." 

Plainly enough his professional responsibili- 
ties failed to repress or pedagogize him; he 
remained swift, alert, unpredictable always, 



162 EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 

and incurably addicted to outdoor vocations 
and amusements. As long as he was in Cali- 
fornia he made seasonal jaunts into the moun- 
tains; the first dated back to 1863 during 
his first sojourn on the Pacific slope — an 
expedition of adventure and discovery which 
he recorded in a dithyrambic effusion in the 
Sacramento "Union" beginning, "We have 
just returned from a three weeks' horseback 
ride among the mountains." From 1871 to 
1882 he usually made these excursions in com- 
pany with his neighbor and friend the Rever- 
end J. K. McLean, who has left a pleasant re- 
cord of Sill as fellow camper-out: — 

"With equal enthusiasm would he court the 
sly wood hummingbirds and delightful water- 
ousels, and coax the lizards; help to fell trees 
for river foot-logs; gather fir and redwood 
boughs for bedding, and chop stumps for fuel; 
take out rattlesnake fangs for microscopic 
examination, stalk deer, and praise the forest 
flowers and mountain lilies." 

It is to one or another of these jaunts that 
Sill alludes in two bits of prose: — 

"I remember one night when we were camped 
by the McCloud River, deep in the heart of the 
redwood forest in northern California. There 
was no moon. Far above us the great plumy 
tops of the redwoods, own kin to the giant 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 163 

trees of the Sierras, rose like cathedral roof and 
towers, and hid the starlight. The aisles below 
were empty and silent, and mysterious with that 
soul of shadow that haunts the solitary woods 
at night. The aisles were silent, but not the 
choir. For, a stone's-throw to the right, the 
voices of the clear, deep river were talking and 
laughing all night long. They were perfectly 
human tones. There would run on for a few 
moments an even, continuous babble; then out 
of it would rise a mingled peal of musical 
laughter, like bells, or clear pebbles striking 
together, or tinkling of ice, yet all the time 
human. Then there would run merry chuck- 
lings up and down the river; and then a shout 
would arise, away downstream, and another; 
and then all the hurrying voices would talk 
loudly together; and then a moment's quiet; 
and then, again, inextinguishable laughter. 

"If I had lain there alone, perhaps I might 
have understood some fragment of this inar- 
ticulate music, or speech. But perhaps, too, 
I might have paid for it by never hearing mor- 
tal accents more; so weirdly this tumult of elfin 
syllables wrought upon me, even well com- 
panioned as I was, there in the dimness and 
unearthly solitude of the starlit forest. 1 

"Over in the Sierra Nevadas, it is true, I lay 

1 The Prose of Edward Rowland Sill, p. 47. 



164 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

one sunshiny afternoon along a gleaming slope 
of the primeval granite, and cooled my cheek 
against its ice-planed polish, and admitted that 
here at last was something pretty old. Yet 
'rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun' as was this 
gigantic adamantine couch, there was a still 
older thing playing at that very moment about 
us. It was the mountain wind. I could put out 
my hand to it, and reflect that it might have 
been this very identical breath of air that 
bubbled up through the sea when the towers of 
Atlantis went down; or it may have flickered 
the flame on Abel's altar. 'You need not/ I 
might have said to it, ' think to palm yourself off 
as a freakish young zephyr, just born of yonder 
snow-streak and the sun- warmed rock; you 
have been roaming this planet ever since its 
birth. You have whirled in cyclones, and 
danced with the streamers of the aurora; it was 
you that breathed Job's curses, and the love- 
vows of the first lover that was ever for- 
sworn. L 

As a teacher Sill was suggestive and inspiring 
to a degree seldom matched, so that his old 
students speak of his classroom talks to this 
day. He was, of course, especially interested 
in language and its niceties. One of his Latin 
students writes of his attention to "true ade- 

1 The Prose of Edward Rowland Sill, p. 259. 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 165 

quale renderings in English. He used to say, 
'When Virgil wrote this he did not merely 
choose words that expressed his literal meaning 
to Roman readers, as if he had been telling his 
grocer which kind of vegetable he would take: 
he had also to convey to his reader the atmos- 
phere, the poetic suggestion, the "light that 
never was on sea or land," which was in his 
own vision, and which would cling about the 
well-chosen word in Latin just as much as in 
English poetry; and you do not render him truly 
into English unless you reproduce all that.' A 
happy choice of a word in our Virgil class was 
a find, over which he openly rejoiced, and the 
class with him." 

And in another place the same writer gives 
a somewhat austere view of Sill's teaching 
methods : — 

"Comparative philology, derivations, the 
laws of language, especially the comparative 
laws, drawn from different languages, inter- 
ested him greatly, and was one of the things 
most emphasized. He liked to speir into the 
psychology of different forms of language ex- 
pression, — why did the Latin reduplicate 
the perfect, and why should an auxiliary like 
'have' express perfect tense to us? Why should 
the Greek mind and the modern European 
mind demand an article, and the Roman mind 
none? etc. He read chapters of Max Muller 



166 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

and other philologists to us, and his own zest in 
the matter made comparative philology seem 
the most exciting of researches. How he found 
time for all this, I do not know: we entered 
college with a preparation as severe as that 
of to-day, in grammar and translation, and 
although our course was three years, and they 
take four now, and have specialized teachers 
in each subject, they get no time for all these 
literary and philological divagations, for the 
careful polishing of translations, the attempts 
to render in English verse, the construction of 
models of Csesar's bridge, — and yet Mr. Sill 
was quite a martinet in the grammatical accu- 
racy he required. He expected paradigms to 
be so learned that they were rooted for a life- 
time; syntax to be minutely understood; and 
he had an old-fashioned (and I think perfectly 
sound) respect for a rule, committed to memory 
till it was a lifelong possession. He was not in 
the least a New Education man, and all his 
variations were played on a conservative theme. 
Rigid drill, memorizing, repetition, underlay all 
his work; and we were never allowed to begin 
to have fun with a subject till we had accom- 
plished the drudgery of it. He did not fear or 
shirk drudgery for himself, and had no idea of 
letting us do it." 

It is recalled that "he kept photographs of 
classical statuary in the room . . . and we had 



TEACHING LN CALIFORNIA 167 

sundry talks about them which . . . gave us 
an infection of his genuine liking for them." 
It was probably his recollections of seeking 
suitable pictures that set him writing years 
later, when he had laid aside the professional 
toga: — 

"If I were a Professor of Literature, I should 
desire to hang my lecture-room with pictures, 
— not of the old traditional and forbidding 
decrepitudes, but of Milton, for example, as 
the charming young swordsman, with velvet 
cloak tossed on the ground and rapier in hand; 
of Homer, no longer blind and prematurely 
agonized, as it were, with our modern perplexi- 
ties in finding him a birthplace, but as the splen- 
did young Greek athlete, limbed and weaponed 
like his own youthful vision of Apollo, as 

"'Down he came, 
Down from the summit of the Olympian mount, 
Wrathful in heart; his shoulders bore the bow 
And hollow quiver; there the arrows rang 
Upon the shoulders of the angry god, 
As on he moved. He came as comes the night, 
And, seated from the ships aloof, sent forth 
An arrow; terrible was heard the clang 
Of that resplendent bow.' 

"I would tamper with even such venerated 
traditional dignities as Mrs. Barbauld, for the 
sake of their own rehabilitation in the eyes of 
misguided youth. She should no longer frown 
formidable behind the stately prsenomen of 



168 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

'Letitia'; she should be given back her true 
girl-name of 'Nancy,' and be represented, after 
her own account, as lithely and blithely climb- 
ing an apple tree. Pythagoras should be a gra- 
cious stripling, crowned with ivy buds and 
stretched at a pretty goat-girl's feet, touching 
delicately the seven-stringed lyre. Even Moses 
might be shown as a buxom and frolicsome boy, 
shying stones at the crocodiles. Only Shakes- 
peare, of all the pantheon, would need no 
change. His eternal youthfulness has been too 
much for the text-books and the monument- 
makers, and we always seem to conceive him 
as the fresh-hearted and full-forced man he 
really was." 1 

For the three ensuing years students and 
classes and the problems of education absorbed 
him. His letters — few and far between — ■ 
seldom touch upon anything else. His class- 
mate, Henry Holt, remains his standby for all 
needs: — 

Berkeley, May, '77. 

Dear Henry, — Your package of books 
for the Students' Library is received. ... It 
has excited considerable enthusiasm in the 
students that one of the great publishers in 
New York should send such a gift. I think it 
has had some result on their views of human 

1 The Prose of Edward Rowland Sill, p. 251. 








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TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 169 

nature, as well at the prospective scholarly re- 
sult. If you know what my notions of teaching 
are, you will understand what place books for 
the student hold in my views of the universe. 
It is my hobby that the best education you can 
give a young fellow (if not about the only edu- 
cation) is to bring his mind in real contact 
with the best other minds. My labor goes in 
that direction: selecting with (I hope) con- 
stantly better discrimination the best things, 
and the best parts of the best, and contriving 
new ways to get the boys the power and the 
desire and the opportunity to assimilate them: 
to "get outside" of them. . . . 

Who would have thought, that night when 
we were sleepily talking about the future, in bed 
in your room in New Haven, in 1860, that 
seventeen years after (what a distance that 
seemed then !) I was to be hammering at the 
young brains in these longitudes, and you were 
to be sending out a lot of steam-power to keep 
the hammer going. The whirligig brings round 
lots of things besides revenges. 

What a surprise it will be a thousand years 
hence if we happen to be doing similar 
things. 

The next three letters are addressed to Daniel 
C. Gilman, who had been President of the Uni- 
versity of California when Sill went there, and 



170 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

was now President of Johns Hopkins. They 
introduce a new figure, Josiah Royce, who was 
to become very well known later, and, by the 
way, to become a very good friend of Sill. 

Berkeley, Nov. 14, '77. 
To Daniel C. Gilman: — 

My dear Sir, — I may as well say again 
that I was very much disappointed at not see- 
ing you. I did not call at your house for the 
reason that I feared you would make the ef- 
fort to see a caller when you were not really 
well enough to do so. I trust you are well again 
by this time: and so ready to be bothered once 
more with questions; as, item, do you know of 
any college in good standing that gives the 
degree of A.B. without Latin and Greek, or 
without Greek? What colleges give A.M. 
without Latin or Greek (aside from compli- 
mentary degrees) ? If I understand aright you 
give A.B. for certain courses which may not 
include Greek. And why not? if a course is 
contrived with stuff in it equivalent. 

Our new President is about announcing a 
course in " Science and Letters," which is to be 
a "liberal education" for business men. I tell 
him — as about the old "strawberry" — there 
might be made a course, perhaps, — and may 
perhaps in the future, — which shall give a 
"liberal education" without Latin; but who 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 171 

has seen such a one as yet invented, or any 
certain product thereof? 

I for my part am unwilling to have much to 
do with — or to be responsible at all for — any 
regular college course, with a degree, which is 
not worthy, at least, of A.B.: or equivalent 
thereto. I am willing to lecture to teachers 
and others on Literature, etc., and do do it; but 
I don't believe a "college" ought to give a regu- 
lar four years' curriculum and give a degree at 
the end of it, unless there is good substantial 
stuff in it, enough to make a rich and trained 
mind. 

Do you know of any young man who has 
the making of a professor of English literature 
in him, and whom I could get next year and 
maybe sooner for assistant, to teach rhetoric, 
composition, etc., 

Sincerely yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Bekkeley, May 6, 1878. 
My dear Sir, — I wish you would tell me 
if you know of just the right man for my 
assistant here next year. I have some little 
hope that I may get the Regents to give $100 
a month. Of course nobody could be imported 
for less than that. In fact I shall try to make 
them offer $125. I believe I have succeeded, 
in spite of the world, the flesh and the Presi- 



172 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

dent, in creating a demand for English studies 
in the university, getting a start largely through 
you. The students want it, and most of the 
faculty do, in theory, though in practice the 
Mathematics still ride us like a nightmare. 
I want a young man for assistant: young, so 
that he may be receptive and willing to do my 
way rather than some older and worse one 
(if he have any better one, I hope to be recep- 
tive) : he should have a genuine love of litera- 
ture and quickness to comprehend it (I don't 
care so much for wide attainment in it as for 
the gift of appreciation of literature and dis- 
crimination as to it): he should know a good 
deal about the English language (and to know 
about that he must be a good mental philos- 
opher — more important even than the phil- 
ology) and the Latin and Greek, and, if pos- 
sible, German. Finally, he should be a good 
writer and speaker (both of these in the natural, 
i.e., modern style) and so the cause of it in 
others. 

If you can point me to such a man, I will be 
very thankful. And if he be, in addition to these 
foregoing graces and perfections, a man with 
a bit of aesthetics about his brains somewhere, 
I will verily use all the eloquence I have or 
can borrow to get him $150 a month. 

I can't get over the conviction, in truth I 
get more and more under it, that the best 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 173 

thing "education" can do for a boy — next to 
bringing him into communication with his living 
fellows, both students and teachers — is the 
getting him into full communication with the 
best that is in literature. I feel as if I wanted to 
set twenty men at work on these students here, 
helping me to do it, or letting me help them. 

I am obliged to you for an occasional paper 
and so forth; I am always glad to get anything 
that keeps me acquainted with your doings. I 
read to my juniors a considerable part of the 
addresses at your anniversary, as notable scraps 
of modern literature. I mean to have them 
know, and I am glad of whatever may help 
to keep me well aware, that there is a world 
outside of Berkeley, and that it moves. 

Sincerely, Edw. R. Sill. 

Berkeley, Sept. 4, '78. 

My dear Sir, — Royce has been duly re- 
ceived, and found to answer the description. 
He will do excellently well here, there is no 
doubt — only, he must not stay too long in the 
wilderness, for his own sake. A certain period 
of isolation in the Desert and of being tempted 
by the Devil is probably good for any of the 
sons of men, but not too long. I shall look out 
that he is not drudged to death. . . . 

I open this again to assure you that I have 
had no trouble whatever from his independence. 



174 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

For instead of trying to make him fit into any 
cast-iron plans of work, I have made the plans 
fit him; and have given him things to do that 
would make the given man most useful to the 
given pupils: giving him logic, for instance, 
instead of the English language, to teach the 
freshmen. And he does admirably with it. 

Scraps from various letters show how vital 
and how wide Sill's interests in education were. 
He is for books and reading, and finds he holds 
a minority view : he wants a Students' Library 
to "supply a crying want of our poor young- 
sters, who have and can have next to no books 
of their own. I find no one here (except now 
Royce — and I could hug him for it) to agree 
with me as to this need of the students. The 
faculty take the ground that reading is a very 
dangerous habit for students! I wish I had 
you here for a spare hour in which to pour out 
to an appreciating spirit my views of the said 
faculty for such (and many such) ideas. . . . 
I am making a list of books to recommend for 
our public school libraries. If you know of any 
list made by competent hands I wish you'd 
tell me. ... I would give a good deal for a 
really well-chosen list of a hundred volumes 
for girls' and boys' reading. ... I want to get 
into communication with somebody in Eng- 
land who knows (or cares) about public edu- 
cation there. . . . We have always been hear- 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 175 

ing about the German schools and universities. 
I am more and more coming to think it is the 
English schools we want to know about and 
universities, judging by results in producing 

thoroughly civilized men. . . . was spoilt 

(temporarily only, I hope and believe) by going 
to Germany before he had thought much him- 
self. I always have said, 'damn the French/ 
and of late I am getting to extend that gra- 
cious sentiment to the Germans." 

At President Gilman's suggestion Sill sent 
his inquiry about English schools to Matthew 
Arnold and got an answer. One cannot help 
regretting that this should be apparently the 
only contact between these two spirits, so 
close akin, but separated by "the unplumbed, 
salt, estranging sea": — 

"I have just heard in reply from Matthew 
Arnold, who says some good strong things in 
favor of the classics — for their own sake, and 
as sine qua non for a real appreciation of Eng- 
lish literature. But he does n't tell me what 
I just now want to know: what books or re- 
ports give the truest and fullest idea of educa- 
tion (below university) in England. I partic- 
ularly want just now a history of education in 
Great Britain. I wish Mr. Arnold would write 
one, with full notes and comments!" 

He keeps at his task of helping his students 



176 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

even after they have left college and has re- 
course again to President Gilman : — 

Bebkeley, Sept. 9, '78. 

My dear Sir, — Do you know of any wise 
man (or woman) who is interested in the ques- 
tion of occupations for educated girls, and to 
whom I could write on the subject? Here we 
graduate every year a number of intelligent 
and virtuous and industrious young women — 
but what are they to do? Teaching, of course, 
is open, but sometimes they don't like that, 
and are not suited for it, or have n't the nerves 
to stand the public school drudgery. . . . 

They drive me to my wits' end every year, 
with the impossibility of seeing anything for 
them but teaching or getting married. 

Do you know of any one East who would act 
as an intelligence office for educated girls? 

Or doesn't the East, any more than "the 
Coast," want any more educated girls? 

Had we better stop producing them till the 
demand increases? By the way, when are you 
going to open Johns Hopkins to girls? 

Royce is fairly at work and begins well. 
Yours, 

Edw. R. Sill. 

Royce just comes in and wishes to be re- 
membered to you : says he shall write as soon 
as he can. 




EDWARD R. SILL, 1879 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 177 

There have not been wanting hints that Sill 
found himself at times in but imperfect sym- 
pathy with his associates. A further hint of it 
comes in a postscript to a note written late in 
1880: — 

"They've been tossing me in a metaphorical 
blanket in the faculty for teaching irreligion — 
especially in a course of lectures I've been 
giving Saturday mornings to teachers from 
Oakland and San Francisco. 

"It would make you laugh if you knew all 
about it. Alas, that you are so far away! I 
could from time to time tell you many a good 
thing, if you were not: humors of the 'educa- 
tional' arena." 

Which recalls a remark among the recollec- 
tions of one of his students : "Had we not heard 
from parental criticism outside, and from his 
absence from the prayer-meeting and church 
activities with which Oakland abounded, that 
he was not considered orthodox, I do not be- 
lieve we should have thought of anything at 
odds with orthodoxy about him." 

But when a professor's religious views — or 
lack of views — become subject of discussion 
in the faculty there are breakers ahead. 

Bekkeley, Feb. 24, '82. 
Some of my young people are trying to find 
out something about Ruskin's St. George's 



178 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

Society. Can you lay your hand on any recent 
promulgation with regard to it? . . . This is 
one of the last times I shall bother you about 
such things probably, for I 'm going to quit my 
chair here and propose not to try to find out 
anything more than comes along naturally, for 
the rest of my life. I have even almost a notion 
I will go to the other extreme and try writing 
some poetry or something, for a year or 
two. 

I have resigned my professorship — to 
take effect in August. Congratulate me. I am 
tired nearly to death — not so much with the 
work, as with the unpromising conditions of 
it, and its environments. . . . 

The interval was filled with interest. There 
was first his twentieth anniversary at Yale to 
which he returned gladly, and there was his 
first and only visit to Europe. Meantime his 
interest in writing becomes more practical. He 
writes, freely as ever, to his classmates, Holt 
and Dexter. 

Dear Hsnry, — As to the wee bookie 
[" The Hermitage"] I have pondered, and more 
than that have (for the first time in six years) 
looked over the volume. If I were to get it out 
again it would be with just half the things out, 
and just about as much put in their place (from 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 179 

magazines, etc.). But this I am not anxious 
to do; for while there is a little demand (as 
I hear constantly from our booksellers here- 
abouts) for a new edition, I look upon it as 
a demand not for poetry but for the Professor's 
poetry. That is, you understand, not a legiti- 
mate demand. The poetry, if good for any- 
thing, ought to make me in demand, not I the 
poetry. 

I am getting on well enough, considering 
what planet we are on. ... I am still trying 
with considerable energy each day (which 
gives out toward night, I confess) to see what 
is good and valuable in English (and other 
peoples') literature. The more I look the less 
I find, but the more I prize what little I do 
find. 

I should like to make a prose book or two for 
you to publish, but I shall not live long enough 
to do it, nor will you ever be likely to be rich 
enough to afford to publish the sort of books 
I should write. 

Berkeley, Cal., Feb. 13, 1880. 
Dear Henry, — Thank you for the in- 
formation for my inquiring student about the 
book-man. I knew about the Social Science 
Association, but my point was that they don't 
go to the bottom-difficulty, viz., what end are 
we after? And secondly, is it the end we had 



180 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

better be after? My notion is that Spencer is the 
only man that has begun to answer that ques- 
tion — namely in the "Data" — and in previ- 
ous hints which he that did n't run too fast 
might read — and that the Associations have 
been puttering about contagious diseases, 
drainage, prison reform, and other such excel- 
lent matters to work at, but the perfection of 
which would leave us very little better off than 
at present. The best thing you can do with 
such people as we have now is to let the con- 
tagious diseases thin 'em out a little, perhaps. 
As to your thought that I have scattered, 
and ought to make myself "favorably known." 
My dear fellow, I like your caring for me enough 
to say this and wish this, but — if you knew 
about my life of late years and my ideas of 
life, you would see. I am not and have n't been 
trying for it. I have been working to educate, 
in some high sense, successive classes of young 
people; and meanwhile to know more about 
education, and especially literature as a means 
of it, and about education in its relation to 
society and life. I am contented to die un- 
known, if I can arrive at the truth about cer- 
tain great matters, and can put others in the 
way thereof. If there is anything which utterly 
disgusts me and makes me howl aloud and 
swear, it is these infernal fools who are fight- 
ing to get their names abroad, and care for no 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 181 

other work. That a man like Spencer should 
be well known is a matter of course and all 
right; but he has not cared for that. Let a man 
work his work in peace, and the devil take his 
name — the less likely to get anything more 
of him than that. 

But I am ever yours. 

You think I write on various subjects. 
No. Only on education (which is my hobby) 
and on literature, with an occasional wild ex- 
cursion into sociology. I take a great and grow- 
ing interest in being the cause of writing in 
others. Have trained up already two "Atlan- 
tic" writers and various smaller fry. I like to 
help at the incubation of poets, especially. 

Berkeley, Feb. 27, 1881. 

Dear Henry, — ... Glad you 've a 'cello, 
too. What a shame for George Eliot to make 
her villain in ' Deronda ' play a 'cello. I wonder 
if Lewes tortured one, and she got to hate it. 

Do you know any way to get introduced 
to the editors of the " Nineteenth Century" or 
any other first-rate British magazine, where 
they would take a poem — a sonnet or so now 
and then — by an American? 

I have a friend who has contributed to the 
" Atlantic," and can, I suppose, whenever she's 
willing, but her poetry is so far above their 
level that I want to get it into a British maga- 



182 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

zine. (This not to be quoted; somebody might 
think I send to the " Atlantic " and am rejected, 
which is n't true.) 

Why does n't New York have a first-class 
magazine of Literature and Thought? You 
start one and make me editor. If a little pro- 
vincial city like Boston can have a decent 
magazine, why can't New York have a really 
good one? Is n't the time ripe? Really, is n't 
this worth thinking of? 

Want me to go to England with you, if 
you go? Or I suppose you would wish to go on 
the Continent. 

Yours ever as ever, 

E. R. Sill. 

... I hope there will be a good gathering 
of our class. Not that I expect it to be a very 
jolly company, for I presume we are all begin- 
ning to get pretty thoroughly sobered down. 
But there are a good many whom I would like 
very much to see. It will be interesting to see 
whether we have all got entirely incompatible 
points of view, by this time. Shall we find old 
friends who can't discover a single common 
ground to meet on — beyond the weather or a 
college prank or two? 

I — for my part — feel a sort of vaguely 
lonesome desire to make a new friend or two 
out of the old ones — if it were possible. I 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 183 

would like to find one or two fellows who be- 
lieve in something that I do — and in doing 
something that I believe in trying to get done. 
Or must we all fight it out alone — solitary 
skirmishers — when we are come to forty 
year. 

Yours ever, 

E. R. Sill. 

There was " a good gathering" and Sill was 
welcomed and honored as he had always been, 
and so, with his heart warmed at the old 
shrine, set out on his trip to Europe. Doubtless 
he was worn and tired from his long stint of 
teaching; for apparently he wrote nothing 
while he was away. Only the merest scraps of 
letters remain, and for his impressions of the 
journey we have to turn to fragments from his 
later prose. 

From Switzerland and the Lake Country he 
sent scanty notes to Miss Shinn whose career 
he followed with keen interest : — 

Geneva, Switzerland, Sept. 1881. 
I was thinking this morning, as I lay wait- 
ing for it to be time to get up (and waiting — 
also — for the clouds to clear away from Mont 
Blanc, so that I could see it better from the 
window), about the difficulties that beset writ- 
ing under all circumstances. It is easy to 



184 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

see why so few good or valuable books have 
been written. The wonder is that any one ever 
surmounts the obstacles, and gets anything 
accomplished beyond plans. I am wondering, 
also, whether you are doing anything with the 
pen. Remember the Statue and the Bust. 

These Alps are very near kin to our Sierras : 
more picturesque, more full of surprises, more 
to the painter's hand, perhaps; but hardly 
more beautiful or impressive — except a few 
regions, as that of Mont Blanc, the like of 
which I have not seen. . . . 

What a long time it takes the mail to crawl 
around such a little pocket planet. 

Ambleside, Westmoreland, Sept. '81. 

This violet is a descendant of the one Words- 
worth is always writing about. At least I 
picked it to-day on the side of the path where 
he must have walked many times, between his 
house and the Stock Ghyll Force. It is a beau- 
tiful region, this of the English Lakes; but one 
does n't see, after all, why poetry should n't be 
thought and felt and written as well at Niles or 
Berkeley, as in Westmoreland. The Alps and 
this region you must see some day. 

In haste, with regards to you all, from both 
of us 

Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 185 

There is a curiously interesting allusion, in 
an essay entitled "Can Tunes be Inherited?" 
to the voyage to England : — 

" It was on a Cunarder in mid-ocean, on the 
voyage to Liverpool. One evening I was loiter- 
ing up and down the deck in the warm moon- 
light, when a group of steerage passengers, sit- 
ting or reclining about the foot of the foremast, 
began to sing in a low and half-unconscious 
strain in the midst of their talk. They were, 
it seems, Welsh people, who were choosing this 
particular time to revisit the fatherland be- 
cause of an approaching Eistedfod, somewhere 
in South Wales. It was, I perceived instantly, 
the 'music of my dreams.' To the best of my 
knowledge and belief, I had never heard these 
tunes, or any such tunes, sung, whistled, or 
played anywhere before. It had so happened 
that I had never lived in or near any Welsh 
settlements. I had never chanced to make the 
acquaintance of so much as one solitary Welsh 
person, so far as I know. Yet here, sung by these 
returning Cymric exiles in the yellow moon- 
light, as we rose and fell on the gently heav- 
ing waves, — here were the very strains that 
had for years been floating, unbidden and un- 
recognized, through my brain." 

When he writes on "The Oldest Thing in the 
World," he is reminded of the cathedrals, and 
but for these parenthetical allusions we should 



186 



EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 



have no idea of his route or the range of his 
journey : — 

"We cross the sea to find a cathedral that is 
truly ancient, and they point us with pride to 
this summer's restorations; but while the group 
stands admiring them, the American slides 
away quietly, and 'slips behind a tomb,' or is 
found rapt on some dear, unrestored nook of 
the ivied cloister. Just so it is on the Conti- 
nent: Paris is always too wonderfully new and 
shining, as if Orpheus had strummed it up only 
this very morning from entirely new materials. 
My favorite spot is in the Louvre, between the 
five-footed bull of Assyria and the rose-colored 
granite sarcophagus of Rameses III. The 
Hague is delightfully swept-up and washed- 
down and immaculately fresh and resplendent; 
but my best moment there was when, in the 
museum, I took in my hand a gold coin of 
Alexander, and as it lay cool and smooth in my 
palm I thought it was probably one that the 
conqueror himself flung ringing against the 
tub-staves of Diogenes, the day that worthy 
growled at him to 'get out of his sunshine.' 

"It is astonishing how insensible we some- 
times are to the most beautiful or sublime spec- 
tacles. Noble scenes, which at another time 
would inspire the imagination and thrill the 
heart with a tumult of emotions, now unfold 
their glory before our unmoved eyes, and the 



TEACHING IN CALIFORNIA 187 

humdrum thoughts plod along their accus- 
tomed way. Travellers know this phenome- 
non very well. Ely Cathedral lives in my mem- 
ory as a delicious vision of solemn loveliness; 
but when my friends praise York Minster, 
I hardly recall that I was ever there. This in- 
difference is to be ascribed to the fact that in 
York my brain happened to be dough or putty 
for the time being, and in no respect on the 
architecture of the minster." 

Returning from England in October, stop- 
ping by the way at Cambridge, New Haven, 
and Baltimore, Sill took up his work at Berke- 
ley for what was to be his last year. A note to 
President Gilman and a few lines to Dexter 
bridge the episode over, and now our man of 
letters takes up what, in spite of his New Eng- 
land conscience, his inherited predilection for 
preaching, and his relentless ethical tenden- 
cies, was his real calling and life-work — litera- 
ture. This is the last of the pedagogy: — 

Baltimore, Oct. 20, '81. 
My dear Sir, — I am sorry not to say 
"how d' ye do" and "good-bye" in person, 
but I would not come round to your house lest 
you should see me when you were really feeling 
unfit for it. I trust you will take a run away and 
not let yourself get ill. I have enjoyed looking 



188 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

into the rooms of the university a bit, and 
hearing some of the exercises, and wish I could 
stay longer; but must return to California next 
week. My stay in England cheated me out of 
my anticipated visit here and elsewhere in the 
East: though I did get a peep at Yale and 
Harvard. 

In haste, as ever yours, E. R. Sill. 

To Pbes. Gilman. 

I am very sorry to hear of Mr. Lanier's 
death. His book on English verse is the only 
thing extant on that subject that is of any 
earthly value. I wonder that so few seem to 
have discovered its great merit. 

I want to find an assistant in English 
Composition and Rhetoric, etc.: if possible 
one who has in him the making of a professor 
of English literature, to take my place before 
long. Know him? 

Yours, E. R. S. 

Beekelet, March 26, '82. 
I sent you one college paper epitaph, and 
here is another. You may be interested to 
see it, and I am rather glad to have you; for 
maybe nobody will ever say any more good- 
natured things about me, unless it be on a 
veritable tombstone. 'Nil de moribundis nisi 
bonum.' . . . 



TEACHING IN CALIFOKNIA 189 

"Perhaps I ought to add that my resigna- 
tion was entirely voluntary (not that I have 
any reason to think the Regents have any ex- 
aggerated estimate of my value). My posi- 
tion had become intolerable for certain rea- 
sons that are not for pen and ink, and after a 
good deal of consideration I decided to leave 
it; though I have no immediate intention of 
leaving Berkeley." 

One of the last things he wrote that bear the 
academic stamp is a bit of jocular verse to 
his colleague Stearns, on which light note we 
may let the chapter close : — 

July, 1882. 

TO R. E. C. S. HORTATORY 

"Come back, my children," arid Berkeley cries, 
Come to my leathery gum trees' bluish shade, 
Come where my stubbly hillside slowly dries, 
And fond adhesive tarweeds gently fade. 

Here murmurs soft the locomotive's shriek, 
And o'er the plain the antic dummy squeals; 
Here picnic eggshells bloom beside the creek, 
That sweetly 'mid its dried-up hummocks steals. 

At morning howls the neighbor's pensive dog, 
At noon the flower-beds don their stony crust, 
At evening softly falls the genial fog, 
And every hour bestows its bounteous dust. 

Come — when you've got to, not a day before! 
Till then, stay there, and heed not Berkeley's lures; 
Drink health and blessing from the mountain's store, 
And still, dear Stearns, believe me, 

Ever yours. 



VII 



MAN OF LETTERS 



Although his relation to the university 
closed with the end of the academic year in 
June, 1882, Sill did not immediately leave 
Berkeley, but remained ordering his affairs, 
and putting into effect some old plans which 
included preparing for the press a collection of 
his poems, "The Venus of Milo, and Other 
Poems," to be privately printed for his friends. 
Perhaps he found it easier also in the accus- 
tomed surroundings to make the transition 
from teaching to writing. At any rate, he lost 
no time in entering upon the new profession; 
he seems to have given no thought to a new 
post as professor, but to have launched him- 
self at once upon literature. In September he 
was in full correspondence with the editor of 
the "Atlantic," and had already taken a hand 
in starting the new California magazine, "The 
Overland Monthly." 

The correspondence with Thomas Bailey 
Aldrich, then editor of the "Atlantic," grew 
more intimate as time went on, and the rela- 
tion became one of mutual admiration and 
regard. Aldrich wrote twenty years later: — 



MAN OF LETTERS 191 

"It was my good fortune to be one of the 
first to recognize the fine quality of his poetry 
and the very first to introduce him to his pub- 
lic — through the pages of the 'Atlantic/ He 
was sadly in want of encouragement at the time, 
and I encouraged him by printing everything 
he sent to me. He was a busy maker of lyrics 
in those days, and in order not to seem to have 
too much Sill in the magazine, I published 
some of the poems over a pen-name, at his own 
suggestion." 

That was a little later; he was now knocking 
at the door: — 

Bekkeley, Cal., Sept. 11, 1882. 
Editor Atlantic: — 

Dear Sir, — Your kind note of the 4th 
declining my paper on the Anglo-Saxon lan- 
guage is just received. 

I trouble you with a reply only because I 
have sent a second paper, and I want to assure 
you that my articles are neither of them scraps 
from my reading of other men's work, but are 
at least "my own" if "poor things." I've no 
doubt your judgment is best, as to how it would 
strike readers of the "Atlantic" and the first 
paperdoes no doubt sound like "odds and ends," 
since it has struck you that way, for one. I had 
an idea my tracing of the Yankee dialect and 
other "mistakes" in speech back to Anglo- 



192 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

Saxon was new. Would you mind telling me 
where I may find anything about that? I sup- 
pose it is only another case like the man in 
Ohio who invented the screw propeller over 
again after it had been used a half -century or 
so. One has to be horribly well read to hope to 
contribute to the mag[azine]. 

I warn you that I shall send you some 
verse if you do not accept my prose. 
Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Berkeley, Cal., Oct. 3, 1882. 
Editor Atlantic: — 

Dear Sir, — I send you a review of Her- 
bert Spencer's "Education." It seems to 
me high time that the error of this very influ- 
ential treatise should be shown, and I should 
be very glad if it could be shown in just the 
region covered by the "Atlantic" — that is, 
among the illuminati — and so "work down" 
through educational thought and practice. I 
believe in Spencer, for the most part, but I am 
sure he is wrong in the fundamental theory of 
this treatise I enclose stamps for return if not 
used. 

Truly yours, 

E. R. Sill. 



MAN OF LETTEES 193 

Beekelet, Cal., Oct. 81, 1882. 
Editor Atlantic : — 

Dear Sir, — Your card of 24th is received 
telling me of acceptance of my review of Spen- 
cer's " Education." Can you let me read a proof 
of it? I am accustomed to that luxury, and 
don't like to forego it unless it is necessary. To 
be sure, I have the habit of making my man- 
uscript ready for the printer, even to punctua- 
tion, but for all that, one can always, by a little 
touch here and there in just the right place, 
add greatly to the value of a paper (or a poem 
even). I have been accustomed to tell my stu- 
dents that the value is usually added by the 
erasing touch here and there : that is to say, by 
lessening the denominator rather than increas- 
ing the numerator. If you are not afraid of 
my being too savage with my own work, I hope 
you will send me a proof. 

Truly yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Beekeley, Cal., Nov. 18, 1882. 
Editor Atlantic : — 

Dear Sir, — I send in to-day's mail re- 
turn proofs of my paper on Herbert Spencer's 
"Theory of Education." I registered them be- 
cause our distance is so great that it would not 
do to have them lost on the way. On the last 
page I have changed the spelling of Shak- 



194 EDWAKD KOWLAND SILL 

spere's name from mere force of habit. If you 
prefer to have your magazine hold to a uniform 
spelling the other way, of course I don't care 
a fig about it. I have very liberal views as to 
an editor's privilege to make non-essential 
changes. Nothing except poetry has any rights 
which a competent editor is bound to respect. 
I am much obliged to somebody for calling 
my attention to certain infelicities, in blue pen- 
cil. If your proof-reader, please make him my 
compliments. 

Truly yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Cuyahoga Falls, 0., March 21, 1883. 
Mr. Aldrich: — 

My dear Sir, — I send registered a paper 
on "English Literature in the College Course." 
It is something I have been getting ready to 
say for a long time, and I feel sure that it is true. 
It is for you to judge, of course, whether people 
will be interested in it; but it follows naturally 
after my paper on Spencer's "Theory," as giv- 
ing some positive suggestions, after that, which 
was negative criticism. It is calculated to stir 
some persons to wrath, no doubt; but it would 
be good for them. And I believe that the best 
of the readers of the "Atlantic " will agree with 
me and be glad to hear the thing said. At any 
rate, I would like to have it appear in the 



MAN OF LETTERS 195 

"Atlantic," rather than elsewhere, because I 
know it would do most good from that van- 
tage-ground. You will find the hall of the 
whole cartridge in the last pages : the rest is for 
powder. 

May I ask you to keep the manuscript for 
me for a few days if you should not use it, and 
I will write or call for it. And will " the editors " 
be kind enough to let me know by a note what 
you decide? 

Pardon my addressing you personally, this 
time. 

Sincerely yours, E. R. Sill. 

Sill had now settled down at the "hospitable 
house" with which we are familiar at Cuya- 
hoga Falls, and his correspondence ordered 
itself with three nuclei — the group of Cali- 
fornia friends at Berkeley, his Yale classmates 
in New Haven or New York, and the maga- 
zine editors. To California he wrote gossiping 
letters, not disdaining the weather, although 
he was tempted into jocular verse when he got 
meteorology in reply : — 

TO MY CORRESPONDENT WHO WRITES OF 
THE WEATHER 

Write all about yourself, my dear! 

For I don't care, I'm sure — Oh, 
Reports as if from "Probs" to bear, 

Or from the Weather Bureau. 



196 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

I wish to hear of you — the straws 
That show which way you're blowing; 

I want to know your life, because 
Your life is worth the knowing. 

I love to follow all your hours; 

Your dreams when day is winking; 
And what you like, in folks and flowers, 

And what you think you 're thinking. 

Then put away upon a shelf 
The outside world; and whether 

It snow or blow, just write yourself, 
And never mind the weather! 

"Zero weather. Snow creaks and crackles 
under foot. Two people cross a carpet and give 
a sharp spark to one another's noses. Went 
skating yesterday. Did n't 'cut across the 
shadow of a star ' because it was daylight, and 
besides the critics say it can't be done. 'Shad- 
ow'? No: what is it? 'Reflex'? 'Sparkle'? 

"A white world, with skeleton trees — ner- 
vous systems anatomized and set up in the air, 
frozen stiff — is a queer thing: unearthly." 

"It's a bad time to take up trees in the 
winter; ground is frozen; roots can't go down. 
This is a parable. If it were summer here, 
no doubt I should be taking long walks and go- 
ing fishing, and mooning about, nights — and 
keeping my old environment out of my head as 
thoroughly as possible. But it 's winter — the 
dead vast and middle of it (as Howells quotes 



MAN OF LETTERS 197, 

of the summer) — and my roots are all in the 
air as yet, and I feel extremely queer. We are 
supposed to have got settled. ... I have estab- 
lished a writing-table with the birds contiguous, 
as near a window as I dare put 'em for fear of 
freezing their noses off; you remember how the 
cold air pierces in between the sashes of a win- 
dow like a long thin knife? . . . They manage to 
have some green leaves and posies under a 
glass — but what looking gardens! They were 
spaded in the fall, so that when not mercifully 
veiled with snow they look all lumpy mud, 
frozen. Gracious! what a looking world. 

"I am supposed to be entered upon a mad 
career of literary work. Have so far only writ- 
ten some very mild verses — suitable for nurs- 
ery use in some amiable but weak-minded 
family. But then I've been skating twice! 
Think of that — real ice, too. You can make 

Mr. B feel bad about that, if you tell him 

— and make him think he'd like to be here; 
but he would n't. 

"It's a curious illusion of yours out there, 
that you can go out and pick flowers and hear 
leaves rustle and see grass grow and feel 
thorough-going sunshine. You can't, you know, 
'cause it 's winter everywhere : snow and ice, or 
frozen slush and mud — it must be. / used to 
have that same hallucination when I was out 
there. Queer. Effect of the Climate, I s'pose." 



198 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

"The air here makes a man feel like stirring 
around lively. Sets your feet to walking you 
of indefinite distances. But there's no splendid 
Berkeley view to behold when you get to the 
end of your walk. We can't have everything 
in one spot. What's the use of crying for the 
moon? Better flatten one's nose on the pane 
and gaze upon it and try to be glad he has n't 
got it. Should have to take care of it and pay 
taxes on it if we had it." 

"I am and shall be interested in all Cali- 
fornia goings-on, for I am glad to accept the 
axiom some one has quoted to me, 'Once a 
Californian, always a Californian.' We may 
be forced to blush sometimes for our politicians 
out there, but our Bay civilization is a thing 
to be congratulated on. ..." 

"Spring just faintly appearing here — 
snubbed by a snow-storm every few days. No 
leaves out, but robins and blue-birds, and buds 
swelling." 

"Summer is a-cumin in. Loudly sings 
cucku, — that is to say, the wobbin, and the 
gluebird, and the noriole. It is 80° — warm, 
and a thunder-storm night before last, and 
crocuses and jonquils and hyacinths and prim- 
roses are in bloom in the gardens, and hepati- 



MAN OF LETTEKS 199 

cas and anemones, as well as arbutus, in the 
woods. But there is not enough oxygen in the 
warm south wind. It is a very soft and musical 
wind on the blossomed elms and maples, and 
just beginning to be scented with cherry blos- 
soms — but it lacks the oxygen of the sea 
breeze. Funny old world ! Where there are 
lovely things to see in the country, the air 
tries to prevent your having the energy of a 
dormouse, to go out to walk and see them. 
Where the air is bracing, there's nothing much 
to go out for to see. Evidently a world not 
meant to make its denizens perfectly contented. 
The duty of not being contented! what an 
easy duty!" 

His letters to Dexter and Williams are in the 
old vein, and there is one to (Governor) Bald- 
win showing how well the college bond held : — 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., April 25. '83. 

Your note and the package came yesterday. 
Thank you very much. . . . 

But the real difficulty with me is to get 
books. No, there's a worse one — to get peo- 
ple. But that, I suppose, we all have, every- 
where. I have organized a town library asso- 
ciation in the village here. Where can we get 
any gifts of books? ... I am trying to get the 
schools into the library work. But oh, for books ! 



200 EDWAKD ROWLAND SILL 

I hope to see your face again some day. 
But I don't know when or where. It is a long 
ways from here to New Haven. Further than 
from San Francisco, a little. . . . 

Cuyahoga Falls, May 7, '83. 

. . . Papers again received. Thank you. 
"The Critic" I see. It is Bohemian, though 
bright enough. Why can we have no magazines 
or papers that are not just a little second 
choppy? "Life," now, as compared with 
"Punch"! Gray -Parker, compared with Du 
Maurier (why does the former never by any 
accident depict a lady or gentleman? Because 
he never saw one, near?) 

"The Spectator" I like very much. Should 
like your copies all the better il you ran your 
pencil here and there where you have said 
"hear, hear." A paper with a pencil line is 
most as good as a letter. " The Church Times " 
is the funniest comic paper I have seen. No 
wonder they can support a "Punch" in Eng- 
land, where the church is itself an education 
in the ludicrous for the whole people. 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., May 15, '83. 
Tuesday. 

My dear Baldwin, — Yours of 10th is at 

hand. I was unusually glad of your letter, from 

the fact that I looked upon you as pretty much 



MAN OF LETTERS 201 

gone out of my horizon. This epistle brings 
you in again, most visibly, and I seem to recog- 
nize that you were not gone at all. You speak 
in a very friendly way of my small volume of 
poems. Yes, they are very middle-age-y; and 
maybe it's better to let the youngsters do the 
piping, as they do the dancing. Tityrus with 
a bald head and false teeth and a shrunk 
shank, — it's enough to titter-us, isn't it? 
(That's the very kind of bad pun you used to 
do in freshman year.) Land of love! — that 
was in 1857-58. Was that just before or just 
after the glacial epoch? As to the Bones poem, 
I shall be most happy to try to have something. 
Perhaps I shall be your way next week, or week 
after, for a day or two, and will try to see you. 
Thank you very much for your kind offer 
of hospitality to us. I don't know whether it 
will be possible for my wife to go on, but I 
should be most happy to accept for one or 
both of us. Let me see. The Bones address 
will be sort of humorous, won't it? — and so 
the poem might be pretty serious — if short? 
Or must I frisk and be very foolish — "pin- 
nacled dim in the intense inane " ? I think I'll 
have to be serious. 

Ever yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

He accepted the invitation, read a poem at 



202 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

the reunion of Skull and Bones at Yale, and 
spent a few weeks of old-fashioned vacation 
at his birthplace, Windsor, whence he writes : — 

Windsor, Conn., June, 1883. 

I have been making a pilgrimage to Elling- 
ton to-day. ... It has been, to begin with, a 
perfect June day, and you remember the look 
of it in these regions: the blue sky with white 
dapples in it, the lustrous leaves not yet long 
enough out of their sheaths to have lost their 
tender new green, the fields full of daisies (too 
full, the honest farmer would say — but not too 
full for the passing vagabonds to enjoy), the 
laurel glimmering in the woods (remember it?), 
the roads as they run through thickety places 
full of the smell of wild grape blossoms (re- 
member 'em?), the rye soft and wavy (nothing 
but rye in the sandy plains betwixt here and 
Ellington, or a little tobacco and spindly corn) 
— plain living and high thinking must be the 
rule out around there among the farmers. . . . 

Ellington is beautiful. It might be just a 
little quiet in the winter, for gay people like 
you . . . but at this season it is great. There's 
a glorious silence there. I saw a man, and a boy 
with a toy wagon, and another man, all on the 
street at once. But they went into dooryards 
and were seen no more. What a dignity and 
placid reserve about the place! The houses 



MAN OF LETTERS 203 

all look like the country-seats of persons of 
great respectability who had retired on a com- 
petence — and retired a great ways while they 
were about it. And what big houses they used 
to build. Used to, I say, because there is n't 
a house over there that looks less than a thou- 
sand years old : not that they look old as seem- 
ing worn or rickety at all, but old as being very 
stately and wise and imperturbable. I am 
struck, all about here in Connecticut, with the 
well-kept-up look of the houses. Paint must 
be cheap — no, 't is n't that. Paint is prob- 
ably pretty dear; but they believe in keeping 
everything slicked up. Yet there are a few 
oldest of the old houses that came out of the 
ark, I know. 

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, July, 1883. 
I have myself just "lit" from a flight among 
Eastern places. Have been gone about two 
months : the old habit, you see, of getting away 
for summer vacation. No mountains, to be 
sure, to flee to, but the White hills — very 
small — are considered and believed to be 
mountains in New England, and I would not 
cruelly undeceive them there. I called them 
mountains whenever I could think of it — 
especially Mount Washington, which really is 
a very pretty piece of rising ground: specially 
at sunset when it "wraps the drapery of its " 



204- EDWAKD ROWLAND SILL 

cloud-shadows and ridge-shadows about it, 
and gets rosy on top. ... I had a few days in 
New York: found it as of old (and more than 
of old, a good deal) a splendid city: nothing 
in Europe handsomer or gayer than Fifth 
Avenue of an afternoon, or by electric light 
in the evening. But I rather hated it, except as 
a wonderful show, and got out of it quickly 
to old Windsor, which is sleepier than ever: 
lovely old place though, — "home of per- 
petual peace." 

It is a generous soul that writes without 
reference to accurate tally of give and get. 

You and are about the only ones among 

my friends that will do it. Why should n't we? 
Are we bound by the slaveries that women sub- 
mit to, with their double entry (front entry 
and back entry) book-keeping of social "calls" 
(hence the phrase, the " call of duty"?) Poo' 
women! Who would be thou! 

July 16, '83. 

I am just back from a summering in the 
ancient and somnolent pastures of New Eng- 
land : some weeks at my old home, Windsor, in 
the Connecticut River valley — you remember 
how green and peaceful that region is, corn- 
fields and hay-fields, and elm-shaded streets 
and maple-shaded houses (with green blinds, 
mostly shut tight) , and patches of their pretty 
woods — the trees only shrubs to a California 



MAN OF LETTERS 205 

eye, but ever so fresh and graceful, and lus- 
trous with rain or dew: a week in the White 
Mountains — they, too, dwarf varieties, but 
capable of good coloring and various pictur- 
esque "effects": and a few days on the Maine 
seashore. 

No discount on the Atlantic Ocean. The 
only thing East that does n't seem like a feeble 
imitation, after living so long in California. (I 
hardly except the people as to certain charac- 
teristics. . . .) 

Aug., '83. 

It is an evidence of the irrational attach- 
ment one gets (as cats do) to places, that the 

Berkeley postmark (which the good Dr. 

makes very conscientiously: ex pede Herculem, 
the mark of a careful and just man) gives me 
always a pleasant little twinge of homesickness. 
It is an evidence of the somewhat more rational 
attachment we get to people, that your hand- 
writing does likewise, only more so. . . . 

We are having hot, moist, muggy summer 
weather. We live on the recollections of the 
Maine coast and the White Mountains. It is 
pleasant to know that there it does n't rain hot 
water. Once in a while I reflect, also, with 
pleasure, that you in Berkeley are cool and 
vigorous and chipper, while we are being par- 
boiled. But there are beautiful things to behold 
here on these summer mornings, and glorious 



206 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

summer nights. We have moonlight here. The 
full moon is a ripper, I tell you. Great on a row 
of maples — big fellows — with a shade deep 
and black. — I hope Mr. Crane is all right 
again. 

Aug. 11, '83. 

Dear Kellogg, — Yours of 4th was re- 
ceived yesterday, and papers containing the 
same sad news of Mr. Crane's death. I had 
heard that he was seriously ill, but afterward 
that he was supposed to be out of danger; so 
that I was greatly surprised when the news 
came. Somehow he seemed a man that would 
not die: there seemed such an amount of quick, 
active life in him. I always thought of him as 
so thoroughly alive. He always came to my 
recollection as he looked when speaking in the 
Club — perfectly quiet in manner and tone, 
and every fibre of his brain evidently electric. 
I had written him a letter a few weeks ago, 
from an impulse to tell him how well I appreci- 
ated him and liked him. I am specially glad 
now that I did. Another evidence that a man 
had better always follow his first impulse. . . . 
And it [his mind] was kept clear and reinforced 
all the time by an integrity of intellect that 
made him look first of all to see what was true. 
Other men were after the right sound, or the 
prudent word, or the polite one, or the amiable 
one, or one that would stop a gap when ideas 






MAN OF LETTERS 207 

were wanting. He was after the exact and una- 
dulerated fact. And my brain was actually in 
love with his, ever since I first knew him. 

Personally, he never in the least warmed 
toward me; but I never in the least looked for 
that. One of the things that made me like him 
was that I seemed to see that he divined my 
own limitations, and weighed me pretty accu- 
rately. I admired him the more from the fact 
that he did not at all admire me, 1 and I liked 
him the more from the fact that his intellectual 
honesty seemed to do justice to mine — a 
thing which from boyhood has been a perma- 
nent craving with me. Well, I did n't expect 
him to die, and I am mighty sorry to lose him 
from this world. Yes, he is one of the men that 
help one to believe in the immortality of the 
soul. I think Crane — the real man — must 
be, somewhere, to-day, just as truly as he was a 
month ago. 

To the Californian friends, particularly Miss 
Shinn, whose literary taste — having largely 
formed it himself — he found congenial, he 
wrote freely and without reserve, mixing sense 
and nonsense, gossip and criticism as the fol- 
lowing scraps and paragraphs from the letters 
of 1883-84 will show: — 

1 In fact, Mr. Crane cherished a peculiar admiration for 
Professor Sill. 



208 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

I 've just finished a paper on the co-educa- 
tion question (you see how the public, at last, 
has got excited about that? Oh, they will get 
the old fogy colleges into it, yet) which I shall 
maybe send to some magazine. The trouble is, 
nobody agrees with anything he reads unless he 
agreed with it beforehand — so what's the use? 
I don't believe a man was ever convinced of 
anything since Adam. People blunder into 
opinions somehow, and then stick to 'em. 

I'll tell you what you are sure to enjoy 
reading — Jane Welch's letters. I was reading 
a book about Rossetti t' other day, in which 
he is quoted as saying she was a "bitter little 
woman" — but she probably snubbed him and 
thought small beer of his brass crucifixes and 
aesthetic flummeries. She was a cracker at let- 
ter writing, anyway. And she must (from his 
own account of it) have suffered no end from 
Carlyle's dreadful ways. She says in one letter 
to him, "it would never do for me to leave you 
for good [I infer she had really considered that 
question], for I should have to go back next day 
to see how you were taking it " ! — I wish I could 
step into my neighbor's there to see how you 
are taking it. Bet you have forgotten where we 
lived and how I spell my name! (Two l's 
— capital S). 



MAN OF LETTERS 209 

So my A verses went in unrevised. 

Just as well. The idea is all there. I almost feel 
like despising and violating all form, when I see 
the fools that worship it. I always understood 
why Emerson made his poems rough — and I 
sympathize more than ever. 

Nor do I like two adjectives with comma, in 
description. Always, I should say, strike out 
one of them {vide vs. Turgenieff). 

Exception 1. When the first qualifies the sec- 
ond + the noun as one quantity (no comma) . 

2. When the two describe practically the 
same quality (as, the long, narrow slit). This 
is not to be found in books, I guess, but is 
correct, is n't it? 

I don't think there's anything in the idea 
that a man must stay out of medicine unless he 
can go in like a monomaniac — i.e., an enthusi- 
ast. Why should n't people go into things 
soberly, seeing the other side, and all sides; and 
with no vows to stay in till death do them part. 
It sounds well to lay down great moral axioms 
about what people should do and should n't do, 
and get them off solemnly to young people — 
to their great impressment but ultimate con- 
fusion; but it is a little absurd. 

Read Caine's "Recollections of Rossetti" — 



210 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

but it will make you melancholy. — Heavens! 
what does n't? Carlyle and Emerson corre- 
spondence, for instance. 

Jefferson's "Real Lord Byron" (Franklin 
Square) makes him awfully real indeed : selfish, 
vulgar, low. Shelley was ten times as much of a 
man. 

C. Kegan Paul's "Essays" are good. 

Old Don Quixote is perennially good read- 
ing. A Dore copy lies on our parlor table, and 
every few days at some odd ten minutes I open 
it and read again. That of the enchanted boat, 
for instance. It is universal human nature. 
Cervantes really was like Shakspere. 

Do you know Landor's "Imaginary Con- 
versations"? Some of them are Shaksperian. 
Read some of them if you have n't. They are 
real dramatic poems, like Browning's, some of 
them. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, e.g. — 
and Dante and Beatrice. 

Hamerton's "Round my House" is pretty 
reading for light reading. — But I have lately 
some moods that require the things that go 
right to the core of the intellect, or else the 
piteous and tragic things that wring my heart. 
Sometimes history — plain prose — will serve 
best. Mommsen's "Rome," e.g., in the Julius 
Caesar epoch. The novelists for the most part 
seem idle chatterers. . . . 



MAN OF LETTERS 211 

Read "Emily Bronte" in the Famous Wo- 
men Series (the style, etc., you need not resent 
or criticise — the total effect of the picture is 
all) — then re-read " Villette." 

How do you like Miss Phelps's new book? 
I confess it moved me greatly — perhaps hit- 
ting just the right mood to do it in. . . . Read 
A. Trollope's "Autobiography"? (Franklin 
Square and big print.) To me very interesting. 
Think of that mother of his! Would like to 
have known her. Be sure you read Renan's 
"Recollections." 

Oct. 25, '83. 

Did you know Kant wrote some poems 
when young (I don't know but later than 
young)? This is one: — 

"Was auf das Leben folgt, deckt tiefe Finsterniss; 
Was uns zu thun gebiihrt, des [sic] sind wir nur gewiss, 
Dem kann, wie Lilienthal, kein Tod die Hoffnung rauben, 
Der glaubt, um recht zu thun, recht thut, urn froh zu 
glauben." 

Have you read Daudet's bit of reminis- 
cence of Turgenieff in "Century"? And the 
portrait! 

If only men did n't die just as they are get- 
ting ripe and great ! Death is n't a gentle 
angel. The old view is the true view. No 
flowers can hide the skull. It is not only awful 
— it is horrible that people should die. 



212 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

You are not like me if you don't find yourself 
doubting the tangible existence of people when 
you have no current evidence. (Talk about 
belief in immortality: I find it hard enough 
to believe in real being at all, when it is well 
around a corner anywhere, out of sight. — Still 
— I do sort o' believe in immortality. Can't 
make myself believe it's all hereditary pre- 
possession either. But whether old friends 
will ever have time to find each other out?) 
(Quid metui resurrectus ? Meantime this life is 
enough for us to think about. There's no 
doubting we live now.) . . . 

The moral of it all is, brace up! As young 
Orme says in"Orley Farm "(you have to read 
two or three of Trollope after his "Autobiog- 
raphy"), it won't do for a fellow ever to knock 
under. To himself, you know. To let himself 
see that he's afraid. Besides, what is there to 
squelch anybody, in all these things? It's an 
episode anyhow. — What '11 you bet we are not 
immortal? In that case the whole affair is only 
a picnic — a day's excursion — and no matter 
how it comes out. To-morrow will have new 
chances. I rather incline to think that all those 
people who die with no hope of (or fear of) 
immortality are in for the biggest surprise of 
their lives. 



MAN OF LETTERS 213 

. Jan. 4, '84. 

You will like this winter weather. Remem- 
ber how the snow creaks under foot, in zero- 
cold? and the good smell of frozen oxygen, and 
how your mustache freezes up, and how the 
fields of blue-white snow stretch away every- 
where, and Pan retires all his passions and emo- 
tions from the landscape, and leaves only pure 
intellect — cold and white and clear? — One 
ought to have, though, a house about seven 
miles square, full of open fires and open friends 
— both kept well replenished and poked up. — 
I should like to see some of these winter scenes, 
and some of these sunsets, out of your west 
window. — I wish you a very happy rest-of- 
the-year. 

You say you have written many times to 
me mentally — and say that such things bring 
no replies. You do them injustice. Certainly 
they do. Only the replies are also mental. You 
have had no end of such. 

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, May 12, 1884. 
Dear Miss B., — You recollect old Geo. 
Herbert after a season of dumps congratu- 
lates himself that once more he doth "relish 
versing" — so there are faint symptoms that 
now that the apple trees are at last in blossom 
I may relish writing to my friends. Alack, I 
have not so many to whom I ever write, or from 



214 EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 

whom I am ever written to (I no longer teach 
the English language), that I need wait so long 
to write at least a brief scratch. . . . The truth 
is I desire to hear from you. Otherwise there 
are hardly enough apple trees out to move me, 
even this May morning. — Is it any wonder 
people talk about the weather? For what is 
there that plays the deuce with us like that? I 
confess I am completely under it half the time 
— and more than half under, the balance. It's 
very pretty now, I assure you. Treacherous, a 
little, but full of greenery and blossoms. In 
New England, no doubt, it is still prettier. In 
the past week the sky — even in Ohio — has 
been summer blue. You remember what that 
is, between big round pearly white clouds? 
But for six months previously it was a dome of 
lead, or dirty white. Now and then, of a rare 
day, the color of a black and blue spot on a 
boy's knee. Once or twice in a month, when 
the sun tried to shine, the hue of very poor 
skim milk. The gods economizing, no doubt, 
and taking that mild drink in place of nectar — 
or slopping it around feeding their cats — or 
the Sky terriers. If I recollect aright, you have 
midsummer in May, there. Hot forenoons and 
bootiful fog in the evening? I would like to 
help you dig your garden. We have now ap- 
ple, pear, and cherry trees in blossom, yel- 
low currant, white and purple lilacs, flowering 



MAN OF LETTERS 215 

cherry: pansies, tulips, lily of the valley, and 
genuine solid green turf sprinkled with gold 
buttons of dandelions. The air is full of fra- 
grance. The robins, bluebirds, wrens, and 
orioles are building wonderful nests all over 
the place. Three red-and-black game bantams 
are parading on the lawn, and seven baby ban- 
tams about as big as the end of my thumb are 
skittering around under the laylocs. 

That is a pleasant picture — "robins, blue- 
birds, wrens and orioles building nests all over 
the place, and bantams parading on the lawn." 
It suggests an easy, well-to-do, comfortable 
way of life. In a sense this is a fair impression. 
The home of his uncle and father-in-law at 
Cuyahoga Falls was an ample house — the 
house of a sucessful banker in a Middle West- 
ern town. As to the household itself, Sill de- 
scribed it himself, in a little unsigned article 
for the "Atlantic" on "The Cheerfulness of 
Birds," with a fulness of detail from which he 
would probably have shrunk if he had not felt 
sure that both his own identity and that of the 
household were safe from surmise : — 

We are, at our house, I confess, a rather sombre 
family. There are no young children among us. 
The elderly people are silent by temperament, and 
grow more silent as age comes on. There is never 
any ill-temper in the house, — never any bickering 



216 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

or nagging, no spiteful epigrams or sidelong sar- 
casms. We seem really to like each other, although 
we are all "blood-relations." We get on, therefore, 
from year to year. No doubt we seem to others a 
happy family, and perhaps we are; but we are never 
a merry family. The house is so built that the rooms 
where the sun shines liberally are not the rooms 
most used; not the rooms, for example, that we are 
accustomed to use together. The heating apparatus 
is that most successful and most lugubrious one — 
steam. The radiators are large black surfaces, with 
just enough of gilt at edge and corner to make the 
black hopelessly conspicuous, flattening themselves 
against the wall as if they were aware of their ugli- 
ness. No blazing and sparkling and cheerily snap- 
ping open fire illuminates any of the " living" rooms. 
(The kitchen is the most cheerful place in the house, 
— as I have occasionally seen it, empty and de- 
serted, after the cook and the maid had retired at 
night, — with the rich hot coals still sending out 
their rays merrily through chink and crevice of the 
range, for the sole benefit of the house-cat, stretched 
out with full abandon on the toasting-hot hearth.) 
Our deplorable habit, at meals, is to attend to the 
business in hand with grave decorum — very de- 
cently and in order, no doubt, but for the most 
part silently. I have known some one of us, ap- 
parently for the moment sensible of something op- 
pressive in this gravity, to venture on a frivolous 
remark, and to have it received in silence, as a thing 
not congruous with the roast meat, especially dur- 
ing the solemn action of its being carved and dis- 
tributed. We come down to breakfast not at all 
out of humor (we are not invalids), but disposed 
to a very calm and peaceful demeanor. We wish 
each other good-morning with a genuine affection, 



MAN OF LETTERS 217 

but the remark, having been responded to, is not 
followed up. An observation concerning the weather 
does not usually lead anywhere. When we have 
a more lively visitor, we easily fall in with his mood, 
and are capable of a good deal of sprightliness on 
such an occasion, — not in the least labored or af- 
fected, either; but by ourselves we are habitually 
silent, and occupied with our own sedate reflec- 
tions. 

All this makes — I cannot but see it and feel it, 
much as I myself share in the responsibility — a 
sombre house. 

But there is one bright spot, and that furnishes 
the text of my utterances now upon the subject. 
It is the tame canary, " Johnny-quil." Not only is 
he himself always cheerful (and who ever saw a well 
canary depressed?), but he is the cause of cheerful- 
ness in others. In the midst of one of our long si- 
lences we hear his little pipe ringing out from his 
sunny eyrie in the porch or the sitting-room, and 
some one remarks, "Just hear Johnny-quil!" Our 
barometers all go up ten degrees. Besides, every- 
body chirrups to him. It is not only, therefore, 
what he says to us, but what we say to him, that 
makes him the enlivener of the family. You can't 
exactly chirrup to a grown-up human being, — 
especially if he is carving a fowl, or reading a re- 
ligious newspaper. But it is always possible, and 
apparently always inevitable, to say something 
chipper and chirpy to the bird, as we pass his cage. 
I have noticed this odd thing: that when Rhodora 
or Penelope or Cassandra stops at the cage, and 
says some little nonsensical thing to the small yel- 
low songster, or half whistles to him in passing, not 
only does he pipe up, but pretty soon you hear her 
own voice, from a distant room, humming a bit of 



218 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

some gay waltz or madrigal. The unconscious lifting 
of one's own more sober mood to the higher level 
of the bird's irrepressible good spirits lasts on a 
little beyond the instant. I recommend him and his 
merry kind to other silent houses. He is worth his 
weight in sunshine. 

The setting, so to speak, for the house we 
shall also get from Sill, in a few sentences from 
another of his intimate little essays for the 
"Atlantic," a picture of the first snow: — 

Yesterday the maples and oaks and the great 
round-topped linden on the lawn were still full of 
their wealth of color. There it lies now on the snow, 
— smouldering reds and yellows, burning with 
dusky blushes on (not in, as ordinarily) the level 
floor of the white cold. 

The prettiest thing, however, in this particular 
case of the first snow, is the way its softness, early 
in the night, caused it to stick fast, silvering the 
windward side of every object. Not only are the 
firs deep loaded, the lower boughs weighted and 
banked till each tree is, from the ground up, a 
continuous tent of snow, but the trunks and every 
round limb and forking twig of the elms and oaks 
are puffed with fleckless white. It makes of them a 
vivid kind of crayon sketch: every bough has its 
dark shadow away from the sun, and its white high- 
light toward the wind. The gate-posts are capped 
high with the rounded ermine. 

The little wren-house on the stub of the dead pear 
tree is piled thick to windward, and fringed with 
icicles on the eaves to leeward, like the abodes of all 
the rest of us. Across the river, on the crown of the 
slope, stands a straight high wall of woods. It is a 



MAN OF LETTERS 219 

reversed drawing in charcoal; all the tops, the soft 
mass of bare boughs and twigs, being shaded dark, 
while the stems of the tall hickories and oaks stand 
forth white as marble columns, and on the smooth 
snow of the lawn stands a slender upright wand, 
left solitary in the deserted tennis-court, where it 
supported the net in the middle. 



VIII 

THE CRAFTSMAN 

In the pleasant surroundings just described, 
having "established a writing-table with the 
birds contiguous," and a "favorite pacing- 
ground, a wide path from the round rose-bed 
to the elm tree, running between lines of stately 
cannas," he continued at his writing. He might 
poke fun at it as he did, — "I am supposed to 
be entered upon a mad career of literary work. 
Have so far only written some very mild verses," 
etc., — but in his heart he knew it to be as 
serious a matter as anything had ever been to 
him. In some respects the conditions at Cuya- 
hoga Falls were all that could be desired, but 
those that were lacking were terribly signifi- 
cant. First and foremost was the lack of atmo- 
sphere and companionship. He had "no man 
like-minded with him." There was not a fellow- 
craftsman within five hundred miles who shared 
his ambitions and with whom he could talk over 
his plans ; moreover, he was far removed from 
the main currents of literary activity — such 
as it was in this country. That he should have 
been able under these conditions to produce as 
much both in poetry and prose as he did and 



THE CRAFTSMAN 221 

to keep the flame in the shrine ablaze is an 
achievement. Yet it may explain why in the 
five years between leaving Berkeley and his 
death he planned and executed no work of sub- 
stantial proportions. A letter to Miss Shinn, 
then editing the "Overland Monthly," throws 
light on a frame of mind which was recurrent 
rather than permanent, but which shows the 
effect of being in a back-water — and a touch 
of his inveterate self -distrust : — 

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, Aug. 16, 1884. 
Saturday. 

I sent you yesterday a pretty long screed 
about Emerson, telling you to use the whole of 
it, or part of it, or very little of it, or none at 
all of it. I should be equally well suited either 
way. 

I don't think other people feel the way I 
do about that. When a thing is written, they 
have a trembling hope, at least, that it is good, 
and anyhow wish to have it used. But you 
should see the equanimity with which I write 
thing after thing — both prose and verse — 
and stow them away, never sending them any- 
where, or thinking of printing any book of 
them, at present, if ever. Sometimes I do think 
I will leave a lot of stuff for some one to pick 
out a post-humorous volume from — but more 
and more my sober judgment tells me that 



222 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

other people have seen or will see all that I 
have, and will state it better. 

It is very strange, though, the difference be- 
tween my positiveness of judgment as to other 
people's writing and my lack of any power 
to judge at all of my own. It would, perhaps, 
be an interesting psychological study for you 
if I could make you see my mind about this. 
I judge swiftly and positively of literature in 
general. For one thing, the consciousness has 
more and more been ground into me that my 
whole point of view is hopelessly different from 
that of people in general — I mean educated 
and intelligent people. Nor do I have the com- 
pensation of feeling this difference a superiority. 
I should have made an excellent citizen of some 
other planet, maybe, and they got me on the 
wrong one. 

I don't feel the least fitness for a writer. 
When anything of mine is to be printed I have 
often a horrid sense — now the fingers of the 
whole universe will be pointing at this fellow 
as an example of a wretch that has mistaken 
his vocation. When it is once printed, I feel in- 
stantly relieved, in the knowledge that nobody 
reads things — after all — or cares whether they 
are good or not. The fingers I perceive to be all 
pointing at more conspicuous objects, or being 
harmlessly sucked in the mouth: so I don't 
care a bit — till the next thing is about to be 



THE CRAFTSMAN 223 

printed. The "Century " has had some time a 
sonnet of mine. You would not believe how I 
have actually shuddered internally each month 
with fear that now I am going to be stuck up on 
a post without a rag on me at last, and my 
nightmare was to come true. 

I don't believe I ever shall write a thing 
that is really good. Yet, with it all, I have 
unbounded conceit of my own judgment about 
the things I feel I see clearly. 

Queer, queer fellows we all are. Must be 
fun for the bigger fellows that hide in the clouds 
and watch us. 

Yours — and I'd like to hear how you are. 

E. R. S. 

The letters show his increasing preoccupa- 
tion with pen and ink. He might say what he 
liked about teaching being his real business in 
life: he took to the writer's trade like a duck to 
water: — 

"Yes, I could do the review, but it might 
not suit your public. I haven't the habit of that 
sort of judicial tone, so called and considered, 
which consists in thinking one man about 
as good as another, and in showing wherein 
everybody is mediocre and not quite so excel- 
lent as somebody else (who would in turn be 
proved mediocre if being reviewed). ..." 

"I would rather take a hand in a collection 



224 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

of French translations than German, for my 
part. For I am coming to believe the Germans 
an unpoetic people — even their greatest poets 
are pretty wordy and dull and clumsy. But 
there is a school of modern French poets worth 
translating. I have been doing some of Sully 
Prudhomme, for instance. It is — to the Ger- 
mans — as cloud-fluff to cheese. Or as the 
violin to the horse-fiddle. . . ." 

He continued the argument in a graceful 
essay in little for the "Atlantic": — 

"Perhaps the best topics on which to feel the 
difference are those two immemorial inspirers 
of song, war and love. When the German poet 
sings of war, it is with the solemnity of Korner's 
'Gebet Wahrend der Schlact.' When the 
French poet sings of it, it is with the 'Gai! 
Gai!' of Beranger. In the one, you hear the 
heavy tread of men, a dull, regular beat, which, 
after all, is not very distinguishable to the ear, 
as to whether it be an advancing column or a 
funeral march. In the other you hear only the 
bugles ringing and shouts of enthusiasm and 
excitement. 

"In their treatment of love there is even 
sharper contrast. The German word Hebe has 
quite a different atmosphere of suggestion 
from the French amour. The German poet sings 
of love and home; you feel that there is at least 



THE CRAFTSMAN 225 

a possibility that the passion of to-day will 
outlast the year, or the years. Constancy is one 
of its very elements. When the French poet 
sings of love, it is very delicate, rosy, beautiful, 
but we do not hear of home." 

"Am hurried just now. Have a manuscript 
story of an author-in-posse to examine and (I 
fear) to criticise to pieces, an article to write 
for the 'Pall Mall ' . . . and a book to review for 
the 'Nation,' which they have just sent me: 
besides being awfully in arrears in correspond- 
ence. The spirit of writing letters has not 
moved my ink-waters for a long while. My 
friends (few enough at the best) must all be 

disgruntled at my silence. is the best man 

about that. He writes without regard to my 
sins of omission. He knows I don't change my 
animum with my coelum. ..." 

"... I am suspicious of eccentric people, as a 
rule, moreover. And the fag end of a famous 
family is never wholly satisfactory: the be- 
ginnings of good blood are better than the thin 
lees. Each generation pours fresh water on the 
same old tea-leaves of genius, and it gets very 
weak. . . . Did you ever look at Galton's 
'Faculty'? Interesting book. . . . He gives 
some copies of composite photographs. I have 
been trying lapping one over another with the 
stereoscope and it works beautifully. . . . 
McGahan's 'Campaign against Khiva' is a 



226 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

good book to read at some odd moments, for 
distracting the mind. I've taken to travels 
again lately. ... I am in the midst of George 
Sand's 'Histoire de ma Vie.' You must read 
it. It is great. We have to take her right in. 
She is a beautiful mugwump. Decidedly you 
must get up your French. 

"This man Flaubert I must find out more 
about. If George Sand (at sixty-two) loved 
him so much at sixty-five, he must have been 
something. 

"I like to find in such histories, that people 
can love when they are sixty, or seventy, or 
eighty. It is all life till love goes." 

Random flashes of self-disclosure light up 
the letters, and a few passages here and there 
show his moods toward the end of 1884 : — 

"Heweis's 'Musical Memories' has a number 
of good things : among others account of Wag- 
ner's Trilogy — descriptive, not so deep as 
most of 'em. Oh, the idiots that write about 
great men — we idiots? Horrenduml 

"Derelictum — but I haven't yet looked 
into Morley on Emerson. I do so hate all I see 
about 'most anybody. Let a man write about 
himself. It 's the only fellow he knows anything 
about. . . . 

". . .1 want to write to you about a lot of 
things, but I hate to use pen and ink. An Eng- 



THE CRAFTSMAN 227 

lishman is said to have invented an addition to 
the telephone which writes out your message 
for you on paper. Why not every fellow talk 
his article or letter into it, and not use pen? 
We're coming to it — but 'slowly, slowly/ 
and we 'wither on the shore' (if that's it). 
Browning is great. Ever read his 'Pauline'? 
Early poem, but things in it, . . . 

"I never could see how any one past twenty 
could reminisce — to other ears, or to their 
own. The past seems so full of mistakes and 
follies and infelicities both from the without 
and the within. — Besides : what need to can 
the old dead sea fruit — there is always a fresh 
day ready to pick off the tree Yggdrasill. Time 
has a kind of tart fresh flavor that I always 
like when picked fresh — but others may have 
all the preserves of that fruit. . . ." 

The series of letters to Aldrich reveals a grow- 
ing regard which deepened as the acquaintance 
went on. Both were poets and craftsmen who 
loved "the tool's true play." The letter to Holt 
comes in not inappropriately. 

To Thomas Bailey Aldrich 

Cuyahoga Faixs, O., July 29, 1884. 
My dear Sir, — You are very kind to 
make these suggestions apropos of my returned 
paper on " Studies." Perhaps I will try to pre- 



228 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

pare such an article as you have in mind, some 
day. There is much in what you say concern- 
ing better methods in the humane studies. I 
wish you would yourself write on that. You 
are no doubt right in refusing this manuscript. 
I know it is very true, but your judgment shakes 
my faith in its useful or suitable form; so that 
I shall not send it elsewhere, but try again for 
you at some future time, unless some one else 
states the thing better. 

I had sent two poems before receiving your 
note. I shall be doing that from time to time, 
and wish you to send them back when you 
don't want them — with the impersonal printed 
slip; for if I thought you were to be put to the 
trouble of writing I should not feel free to 
send. 

You understand, I don't send my things 
about. I have, to be sure, sent to the "Cen- 
tury," rarely; in fact they have a weak sonnet 
of mine now whose appearance I have been 
dreading monthly for half a year or more, and 
which I ought not to have signed. And I give 
the "Overland" something, now and then, from 
patriotism and admiration of Miss Shinn's 
heroic efforts to keep her magazine afloat out 
there. 

I am rather ashamed of sending you things 
you don't want, but I have no friendly sage at 
hand to help me judge of my things, and I can't 



THE CRAFTSMAN 229 

tell myself. So I have to send and trouble 
you. 

Thanking you again for your friendliness, 
Sincerely yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., Oct. 7, 1884. 
Will you tell me whether you would rather 
have more than one poem from a man at a time, 
or not? I mean if they are acceptable poems. 
That is to say, do you like to have on hand 
accepted poems in advance from a writer of so 
small fame as myself, or not? If I knew what the 
supply was, I should be able to judge for my- 
self; but really I have always been at a loss to 
know what you would prefer. As the " Atlantic " 
is the only place I really care to print, and as 
I send very rarely anywhere else, it would be 
convenient for me to have a hint from you on 
this point. 

Truly yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., Sept. 26, 1884. 
This picture is true to the great Redwood 
forests of California. Perhaps it would not seem 
untrue to the Eastern pine woods, as well. It 
was pencilled down in the actual forest, though 
only just now "written." 
Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 



230 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

Cuyahoga Falls, Oct. 22, '84. 

Dear H , — I send an article on Emer- 
son, good quotation for these times on one page 
(leaf turned down). I shall vote for Cleveland, 
but I don't like such a Hobson's choice. Vide 
November "Atlantic" Contributors' Club for 
some French translations of mine. I only dared 
say what I do about German poetry under the 
fiction of a friend who thinks so. I still think 
a volume of French translations would be a 
good venture. I shall want to see and read the 
German one when it is published, for of course 
I know well enough there is some grand poetry 
in German. 

I will not say anything about Frank's 1 
death. As Williams wrote me (announcing it 
in five lines) "there is nothing to be said." 
These things are getting to seem "life" to us 
now — which once looked to be something 
different. 

Ever yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

1 Francis E. Kemochan, founder of the Red Room Club in 
New York, from which grew the University Club. If there 
was any sort of honest man that, at the outset of his college 
life, Sill liked less than any other sort, it was the polished New 
Yorker, and Kemochan was this ad unguem, and there never 
was a better gentleman. Sill grew to appreciate him, and he, 
William H. Fuller, the well-known art connoisseur, who died 
in New York about 1895, and Stanford Newell, U.S. Minister 
to The Hague at the time of the First Conference and a mem- 
ber of it, were the classmates probably next to those often 
mentioned in the text in intimacy with Sill. 



THE CRAFTSMAN 231 

Cuyahoga Falls, 0., Nov. 27, '84. 

My dear Editor, — I send one other ver- 
sion of the sonnet, and the final one, I prom- 
ise you. I did not quite like the "Chateau in 
Spain," for while its mood was congruous 
enough if one understood her to say it with 
some bitterness, — which would account for 
such a colloquial phrase, — this might be too 
much of a subtlety for the hasty reader, and we 
must suppose all our readers to be hasty? 

It would be a fine retort to make to me — 
"Allons done, oh, come now! when you get 
your things to suit you send them, but don't 
bother me so much." I will understand it to 
be made, and try to be better in future. 

I enclose a fresh sonnet as apology for this 
note. Take either version of the other, or send 
back both that and this if you like. 
Sincerely yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

"I like the anonymousness of the Contribu- 
tors' Club. Would you not as soon print poems 
for me unsigned? ... I like very much this 
hammering at a poem when (as has too seldom 
happened) I have a criticism that is worth any- 
thing, to suggest it to me. 

"I should like it if I could talk over poetic 
forms with you, by word of mouth, some- 
time." 



232 EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 

He opens the year 1885 with a dithyrambic 
outburst on the weather and the landscape, 
shot through with his ineradicable scientific 
curiosity — this time about the reasons for the 
cylindrical structure of ice formations on the 
branches and twigs of trees : — 

Jan. 18, 1885. 

It would be the greatest Christmas card 
you ever saw if I could send you a look at our 
world this morning: mercury, 1° below zero; 
ground, no ground at all — but a sheet of ice- 
crusted snow everywhere; every shrub and tree 
a little cylinder of ice. The sun is on it now, 
and the wind wags everything (not "waves," 
because all is stiff in the ice-armor. It is 
strange to see the awkward swaying of the elm- 
boughs, as if drunk, and staggering about), and 
everything glitters, with points of fire — cold 
fire (like Tennyson's stars, in "Maud") that 
comes and goes incessantly. Why am I not out 
looking at it? Because I went out and fed my 
chickens, put hot water in their frozen crock, 
got straw from the barn and filled one end of 
their day-house, as foot-warmer for them, 
stared around awhile, and got enough of it. 
Zero weather nips the human nose and ears, 
when these have been mollified by ten years of 
California and more. 

C. F. (the same that I was writing this 



THE CRAFTSMAN 233 

morning — for it is still Sunday, Jan. 18, '85 — 
except that the sun has gone down and taken 
the glitter with it, though it has left all the ice). 
It shone hard as ever it could all day, but made 
no more impression on the ice-armor of the 
trees than if it had been moonlight. I said this 
morning, in my state of crude ignorance, that 
each twig was surrounded by a cylinder of ice. 
I have taken two walks since, one of them into 
the woods down the river, and know more than 
I did — like the boy that the mule kicked. I 
find that the ice has made a cylinder on the top 
of each lateral (or slanting) twig, fastened to it 
along a narrow line only. That is to say, the 
twig is more than two thirds free of the ice. On 
vertical twigs and branches, it is on the lee- 
ward side. It is a case for Professor John Le 
Conte. I cannot understand it. The ice-cylin- 
der is one-fourth inch diameter on one-eighth 
inch twigs. Little terminal clusters of maple 
buds have small globes of ice around them. 
Any weed that has pendent seeds or berries 
left, has now diamond drops. The grasses that 
stick up through the crusted snow (all glairy 
like ice) have ice-cylinders on the leeward side, 
sometimes one-fourth inch on mere threads, 
and always attached only by a line on one side, 
occasionally even skipping for a little space, 
and not touching the grass. Some grasses 
stand up thus [sketch] broken and pendent. 



234 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

The ice has made long drops on every thread 
and seed. One field of delicate weed-stuff (dried 
and frozen, left standing from last fall) was a 
wilderness of glitter — a mimic "glittering 
heath" of Morris's "Sigurd." All this ice- 
work, by the way, is perfectly pure, transpar- 
ent crystal. You know how finely divided an 
elm's ultimate twiglets are, when bare? Imag- 
ine each one sheeted in this crystal and every 
one a separate thread of white fire in the sun, 
and glittering in the wind. One street is set 
alone with such elms, arching over into maples 
on the other side, and you can picture the vista 
it makes. If you meet Dr. John, . . . ask him 
what he makes of horizontal icicles, laid along 
the tops of twigs, just touching them. 

It is curious to see how much the matter of 
signature — that is, of publicity, bothered Sill 
in his writing. He was perhaps supersensitive, 
unduly self-conscious; but if that is granted, 
the reason doubtless lies not so much in his 
temperamental " skinlessness," as in the nature 
of the writing into which he found himself 
drawn. There was no solid block of work — 
biography, history, treatise or textbook — set 
or suggested to him. He found a demand and 
a market for one sort of thing, fortunately or 
not, the lyric and the personal essay. He was 
thrown back upon himself: he must perforce 



THE CRAFTSMAN 235 

" look in his heart and write." To keep his 
countenance he would fain keep hidden so far 
as he might. His excuse for preoccupation 
with the matter is complete, "but if writing or 
printing verse is a serious or important matter 
at all, of course this is serious and important to 
me." He writes to Aldrich : — 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., Jan. 20, 1885. 

My deab Sib, — May I ask you about a 
very personal matter. You know it is a com- 
mon experience that men have some mood — 
either a thing that properly belongs back some- 
where in past years, and recurs as a memory, or 
one that pounces suddenly in on a life where it 
does n't belong, and goes again — a mood that 
he expresses in verse — perhaps exorcises by 
doing so. He does not wish to put his name to 
any such thing, and have his tailor or his den- 
tist confer with him about it the next day, and 
yet it may seem a thing that is human enough 
to be worth putting in print. Why should not a 
man therefore assume a nom de plume (plume 
de vie) to be used for certain writing? As if 
Mr. Dick in "David Copperfield" had signed 
his sane writing "Dick," and his accounts of 
Charles I's head "lunadick." 

You said you did not wish to print in the 
"Atlantic" any anonymous poems (by the 
way, I should like much to see more ones there 



236 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 1 

since you told me of your own relation to 
them). 

It may be said — but a man would be in 
danger of printing (or offering for print) things 
that he would have made better if his own 
name were to go with them. No, I think not. 
If he had a permanent mask he would be more 
sensitive about this even than his own proper 
face, and would do his best for it. 

I wonder if this is not done more often than 
people suspect. 

For example, I send three things, signing a 
name I have evolved from my inner conscious- 
ness. And one with my own name. If you can 
find a leisure moment, sometime — at your 
convenience — will you tell me what you 
think about this matter of the mask? 

The poems, of course, may come back with- 
out your being at any trouble about them, if 
they do not seem available. 

Sincerely yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., Jan. 25, 1885. 
My dear Sir, — Let me add a word about 
the mask or "nom de guerre" question. It has 
just occurred to me that you may be under the 
impression (as I find a number of acquaint- 
ances are) that I have published a volume of 
poems. The little collection which I privately 



THE CRAFTSMAN 237 

printed two years ago was noticed among some 
"recent poetry" in one or two magazines 
(though I did not send them anywhere for 
review) and so the impression got abroad that 
it had been published. Now, if you supposed 
me to have thus claimed a place among the 
poets and failed to get it, you might possibly 
interpret my wish to print poems over a mask 
name, as that most absurd of things — the 
effort to retrieve under a mask, a failure of the 
open face. No, it is far from being that ridicu- 
lous motive — impossible in any case, as I have 
never made any effort to make my own name 
known. (I did publish a small volume when a 
boy — of poor stuff — out of print years ago.) 
My motive is what I mentioned to you 
before; and another thing — half fantastic you 
might think it — which cannot be very well 
explained to any one at present. Pardon me 
for thus forcing my personal affair on your 
time and attention. But if writing or printing 
verse is a serious or important matter at all, of 
course this is serious and important to me. And 
your courtesy to me hitherto has tempted me 
into speaking of it to you. 

Sincerely yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Meantime a matter of larger moment looms 
up. Holt asks if he would consider returning to 



238 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

the academic world under conditions which 
surely at an earlier day would have made the 
strongest of appeals to him; namely, to teach 
English at Yale. There is no evidence that 
the Yale authorities were behind the question. 
Mr. Holt has no recollection that they were. 
It was only a desire on the part of a friend of 
the man and the institution to see them to- 
gether. But now it probably seemed to Sill 
too late. He states his own reasons; behind 
what is said we may discern signs of the conflict 
then raging between the "scientific" and the 
"humanistic" wings in the faculties of Ameri- 
can colleges. Sill was probably wise in wishing 
to avoid that strife. As to the "plain duty" to 
which he refers, that appears to have been the 
obligation to watch over the health of one of 
the members of the household. 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., Jan. 23, '85. 

Dear Henry [Holt], — Yours of the 21st 
received. Thank you for answer to my ques- 
tion. 

As to whether I would accept a certain 
offer, if made : — there would be two very seri- 
ous obstacles. First, that I am not the man, in 
several important respects, to fill the place 
well. I know the sort of man it requires, and I 
am not the one. Second, that I could not leave 
here at present. My plain duty is right here 



THE CRAFTSMAN 239 

and it would never do to run away from it. 
Very good of you to think of such a thing. . . . 
A man for that place should be picked out by 
his enemies, not his friends. There is a great 
opportunity there. 

As ever, 

Yours. 

A few days later he writes again : — 
"Neither ought I to give you the impression 
that the religious question is my only reason 
for not encouraging any effort to have me 
selected at Yale for the vacant chair. . . . 
Again, I would be sorry if I had made you 
suppose that I am one of those bull-headed 
enthusiasts who wishes to foist his own hobby 
into every company. I remember one of my 
students, since graduating, giving me warm 
praise for the delicacy I had seemed to show in 
respecting the religious points of view of my 
classes, always. 

"But, on the other hand, you cannot, of 
course, realize (till you have come to teach the 
subject) how all our best literature in this 
century — and a good deal of it in the last cen- 
tury — dips continually into this underlying 
stream of philosophical thought, and ethical 
feeling. 'In Memoriam,' for example, is one of 
the poems I read with my senior classes. You 
may discuss its rhythms, its epithets, its meta- 



240 EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 

phors, its felicities and infelicities of Art, — 
you are still on the surface of it. The fact is 
that a thinking man put a good lot of his views 
of things in general into it — and those views 
and his feelings about them are precisely the 
'literature' there is in the thing. And the 
study of it, as literature, should transfer these 
views and feelings straight and clear to the 
brain of the student. ... So of 'Middlemarch,' 
or'Romola.' Or Hume's 'Essays.' Or 'Faust/ 
or 'Manfred,' or Renan's 'Souvenirs de Fen- 
fance.' 

"The more you think of it, the more you will 
come to see that the moment you drive the 
study of literature away from the virile 
thought of modern men and women, you drive 
it into the puerilities of word-study, and 
mousing about 'end-stopt lines' and all that." 

The allusion to Yale in this letter to Holt 
evidently led his mind back to California, and 
he lets out vigorously at the politics and nar- 
rowness of the place : — 

Cuyahoga Falls, March 22, '85 (?). 

Dear H , — Yours of the 15th was 

received yesterday. I am sorry to hear you 
have to look out for your health at all. No 
doubt a few weeks of change will make you all 
right again. My own prescription for nervous 



THE CRAFTSMAN 241 

dyspepsia would be a couple of months of 
roughing it in the hills, say in California; but 
perhaps it would not suit everybody. A New 
Yorker would perhaps be unhappy without his 
accustomed conveniences, and so defeat the 
end. For it is necessary to be a little happy, I 
suppose, to really cure dyspepsia. I shall hope 
to get good news from you after you have been 
free from business awhile. 

Language chiefly conceals thought, and as 
of old I never find that a letter has given much 
light, on any complex subject, to my corre- 
spondent. I think we would probably agree 
more nearly than a correspondence (epistolary) 
would ever indicate, as to Yale College, et alia. 

Perhaps I gave you the impression (not 
that it's any matter) that my leaving the 
University of California was caused wholly by 
the religious question. In fact this was only one 
vexation out of many. My heart was very 
much set on two or three matters of university 
progress, and things turned so as to defeat 
them. For instance, I was interested (and am) 
in the education of women. I wanted to make 
co-education a complete success, and to that 
end wanted to cut off a class of silly girls who 
had no preparatory attainments and no par- 
ticular purpose, and who kept swarming in on 
us as "specials" or "partial course" students. 
Then the last straw was . . . which made the 



242 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

position of any self-respecting professor in- 
tolerable. The others stuck, liking their seats 
and salaries ($3000 a year we had) ; but I let 
that go in with a certain lack of physical tone 
to determine me to resign. 

He might easily have been thinking of Holt 
and the rest of that loyal group of Yale class- 
mates when he wrote : — 

"How perpetually true it is that we never 
learn anything new about anybody when we 
have summered and wintered him in college! I 
guess that's the chief good of a college course 
— to know a few types right down to bedrock. 
(It's a good sign as to the complex value of a 
college education, that we are always finding 
some new thing that is the 'chief good of a 
college course.') 

"Have I remarked to you a few hundred 
times that I have discovered that no one has a 
friend except college people? Business men 
who never went to college never have such a 
thing as an intimate friend. Don't know what 
the word means." 

Partly as a result of writing his opinions of 
French literature, — and then questioning 
them, — he began reading French furiously 
and would have his friends do the like. 

"Really you'll have to get up your French 



THE CRAFTSMAN 243 

and read George Sand's * Autobiography.' . . . 
The only refuge for you from the whizzing of 
the brain along one track, is in reading French. 
Really I don't know how I could have tided 
over certain days and nights I have had, ... if 
I had n't had a French story to read. You see 
there are n't any more good English stories, 
and you have to read the French ones. There 
never were many of the kind I mean — where 
the plot, and a certain snap about the dialogue, 
lead you along page after page. The French 
stories keep a mature mind going, just as Eng- 
lish ones do a child's mind. George Sand, or 
Dumas pere, takes my mind along just as 
Dickens used to when I was a boy. I confess 
that in the case of Dumas there is not so much 
residuum as in the case of Dickens — it all 
goes in at one ear and out of the other — but 
who cares? The thing is to drag the mind 
away from its pizens, and keep it away long 
enough to recuperate a little. ... If I spell 
'favour' it's perhaps because I have been read- 
ing French lately. Though I always did prefer 
those u spellings, a little — while despising 
such questions too much for thinking much 
about it. I have a vague sense that words have 
a family pride in their true origin, that may 
as well be respected. As if a word should say to 
a person who spells it in its derivative entirety : 
' Oh, who is this that knows the way I came? ' 



244 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

Somehow, there are several of the Websterisms, 
or Americanisms, that jar on me as indicative 
of not knowing the way they came — or much 
else." 

The publicity which attends most writing, 
especially that of the magazine writer of 
poems and occasional articles, continued to 
annoy and vex him. It crops up in various 
letters, first in a casual manner : — 

"More and more I wish all literary work 
was anonymous. These people who are madly 
tearing around after a reputation, and these 
people (worst of all) who assume that we are — 
that is the really appalling thing. ... I wish 
they wouldn't always 'say something' if a 
body send some printed thing. . . . 

"Don't tell any such thing about what I 
write anonymously to any one with a penchant 
or opportunity for newspaper 'personals,' ever. 
I dread them exceedingly. I had an offer 
lately to be personalized, which really scared 
me. The safest way is not to tell anybody, till 
things are a year or two old and no longer of 
interest. . . . 

"... Her interest in things outside of rela- 
tion to her seemed rather fictitious. It is a 
horrible penalty to pay for fame and flattery. 
I more and more believe the only way for 
ordinary mortals is to keep out of sight, and 



THE CRAFTSMAN 245 

write anonymously. Why not? It seems to me 
I should like a man very much, who, having 
gained a good reputation, went on doing better 
and better work, * smiling unbeknownst.' He 
would like to succeed first and then do it to 
make it clear to himself it was no fear of failure 
or timidity." 

And then he utters it more fully to a friend in 
California and in more than one letter to 
Aldrich : — 

Cuyahoga Falls, Nov. 1, — Monday. 

The trouble about signing one's name to 
poems is that stupid people (and we are all 
pretty stupid sometimes) persist in thinking 
every word literally autobiographical. I have 
had enough annoyance from that to sicken any 
one of ever writing verse again, or anything else 
but arithmetics and geographies. Even then 
somebody would hate you for your view of the 
Indian Ocean, or fear the worst about your 
character because of your treatment of the 
Least Common Multiple. People are getting to 
write anonymously now and then. (You did n't 
write ' ' The Breadwinners, ' ' did you ? Perhaps 
the Janitor at the University did — or Bacon 
the printer, or Henry Ward Beecher.) 

As to French poetry, I know there's an- 
other side. I believe as I used to, about the 



246 EDWAED KOWLAND SILL 

mass of French writers. It's only here and 
there a George Sand or a delicate poet. As to 
German — Heine was a Jew of the Jews. You 
might as well instance Job as a German. A 
friend of mine calls certain graceful verse 
" unsubstantial." It 's true much of the French 
is so. 

Your test is the best one: which sticks in 
the mind. Or as some one puts it, as a test of 
great writers, whose work has most entered 
into the world's intellectual life? 

Yours, 

E. R. S. 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., April 10, 1885. 
But, my dear Mr. Aldrich, — Don't you 
see the difficulty in the way of my printing such 
poems as that "Tempted" over my own name, 
— la staid citizen, the husband of one wife, as 
saith the Scripture, the model for ingenuous 
youth, the sometime professor of coeducated 
young men and maidens, and all that. I tell 
you there is no comfort for a man the minute 
he begins to write anything that is an intimite 
or that sounds (whether it is or not) like the 
voice of any personal feeling or experience 
beyond the humdrum — no comfort but be- 
hind a mask. Print me over a nom de goose 
quill (I have one that pleases me a shade better 
than the one I suggested before) — and I will 



THE CRAFTSMAN 247 

send you some remarkable poems. I cannot be 
sure what they will be most remarkable for — ■ 
they may make your hair stand on end and set 
your teeth on edge by their "sincerity," but at 
any rate I would like to try the experiment. 

(I have another reason about which I 
should have to write seriously, if at all, so I 
will not go into it.) 

I like my own name very well, you under- 
stand, and have no reason for anything but 
modest pride in it, and yet — for one reason and 
another — I don't care to see it in print; and 
especially under any sort of genuine poetry. 
For once, then, let me coax you to put your 
objection to the pen-name in your pocket — 
and go write under that brief poem "Haden 
Dana," and we will see if we will not fool 
the world into believing he is a poet before 
the magazine is many years older. 

Please treat this name as confidential, whether 
you consent to be god-father to it or not. 
Very sincerely yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Cuyahoga Faixs, O., April 18, 1885. 
Dear Mr. Aldrich, — I know that such 
poems are "dramatic" and that no one has a 
right to pin a feeling or thought down to a par- 
ticular origin in fact — yet some one will al- 
ways do it, and that some one the very one you 



248 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

would prefer not. It is n't the great public one 
fears, it is the some ones. 

Browning with his "fifty men and women" 
has a right to step out of any personal account- 
ability for their utterances, yet don't we know 
after all, that most that is good for anything is 
autobiographic in one sense or another? If you 
ever do write the Reflections of the To-be- 
hanged, I, for one, shall never be able to avoid 
the dim suspicion that you have murdered 
some one in your dreams, or been mad enough 
to do it. 

You need not fear my being too "candid" 
for your taste, unless my own taste should 
suffer some change, or give way before some 
strain at present unforeseen. I am pretty 
deeply impressed, myself, with the truth that 
there are plenty of things "worthy of sacred 
silence." The indecent exposures of the small 
poets and poetesses are frightful. The poetesses 
are the worst, I believe. I hardly know a maga- 
zine at home or abroad, except the "Atlantic," 
that has not printed things that offend a nice 
instinct of silence. 

As to names, "Haden " had not struck me as 
an "album word." It was familiar to me from 
the noted etcher, and suggests rather Haddam 
and haddock, etc. But I trust your sense and 
abandon it gladly. Wilson Dana somehow has 
long spindling legs in my imagination, and an 



THE CRAFTSMAN 249 

unkempt beard, and has something to do with 
patent medicine, or pills; I can't tell where he 
gets the association. If "Andrew Hedbrook" 
seems to you a good sort of fellow, will you 
take him? 

Sincerely yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Andrew did seem to Aldrich a good fellow 
and under this cloak Sill wrote with increasing 
ease and freedom. He was soon apologizing for 
his too frequent appearance in the "Atlantic," 
where, however, neither editor nor readers ever 
found him unwelcome. 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., May 11, 1885. 
Editor Atlantic, — 

Dear Sir, — My friend Andrew omitted 
to enclose stamps with a bit of dramatic dia- 
logue sent to-day. He takes the opportunity to 
slip in another small poem — not expecting 
you to keep all he sends, but wishing you to 
have the best of what he writes, and believing 
you are the best judge of that. 
Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Surely it can have happened only rarely in 
the history of our fledgling literature that a 
poet-contributor has been so fortunate as to 



250 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

have a poet-editor with, whom, in the craftsman 
spirit, free from thought of self-interest, he 
could discuss details of rhythm and assonance, 
and sense and sound : — 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., May 27, 1885. 

Dear Mr. A , — Or is one of these 

better? (In the " Dead Letter " near the end, it 
should read: "Its white ghost in the ash" in- 
stead of "the w. g.," etc., as perhaps I wrote 
it.) 

I am sorry to make you read so much 
manuscript. I hope you are a very patient 
man. 

A patient poet once received 
So many manuscripts, he grieved, 
And cried, O choke for me, I beg, 
This goose that lays the daily egg! 

A. Hedbhook. 

Cuyahoga Falls, 0., June 9, 1885. 

Dear Mr. A , — It occurs to me after 

mailing the proofs of the "Hermione" lyrics 
and Shakspere : — 

1. The prose has too much title. Omit 
"Interlude" and leave it "An Imag. Conver.," 
etc. 

2. I altered the couplet near the beginning 
not wantonly to make more printers' work, but 
because I remembered that it might betray the 
author, as it stood, to one person. If I am to be 



THE CRAFTSMAN 251 

"anon," I prefer not even to have my left 
hand know what my right hand doeth. 

3. In the first lyric I changed "blest" to 
"dear" to avoid rhyming with the last word 
of the stanza before. 

4. Would it not be well for you to alter 
spelling of "stepped" (3d stanza, 1st lyric) to 
"stept," so as to rhyme to the eye as well as to 
the ear? Or not. 

In the last and least lyric I went back to 
your suggestion for the last line of first stanza. 
I am always glad to have suggestions from you. 

I tried to get off in a corner to write this 
note, but the ubiquitous Andrew found me out 
and insists on my slipping in another thing 
from him. 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., May 81, 1885. 

Dear Mr. A , — By all means print 

the Shakspere Interlude unsigned, as you sug- 
gest. It would suit me very well to have 
everything printed unsigned, except those 
things on which I nom-de-plume myself — or 
any of those, that you are willing to print that 
way. 

If you want a fine poem from Andrew along 
in the summer or fall, — a really effulgent 
one, or perhaps some wonderful pyrotechnic 
prose tale, — you have only to furnish him 
with a bit of information — namely, this : 



252 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

where can be found in the United States short 
of California, a spot in which to spend three 
weeks (say, of August) where there is either, — 

1. Water to boat on, 

2. A mountain to climb, 

3. A forest to ride in, 

4. Pound trout to catch. 
And where there are not — 

1. Mosquitoes, 

2. Empty preserved meat cans, and dis- 
carded paper collars strewing the scene. 

In other words, a scrap of nature unpolluted 
by Punch's 'Arry with his "alarums and excur- 
sions." In California I lived on the privilege 
of spending every summer in perfectly wild 
places, and I feel the ache for it coming on me 
tremendously. If any man in Boston knows of 
such a place and will impart the knowledge to 
you and you will pass it on to Andrew, the 
gorgeous literary work shall be forthcoming. 

I should add that he is forced to count the 
cost, even to quarters, else he would go to Cal- 
ifornia for what he wants. 
Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Sill's acquaintance with Aldrich had advanced 
to the footing where he was now writing him 
on the most serious subjects in the world — 
Religion and Getting a Living. 



THE CRAFTSMAN 253 

His letter on the first of these subjects 
should be placed beside one written a little later 
to Holt, for the two together not only give a 
fairly good account of the position he had 
reached but, by recalling that intensely per- 
sonal and pathetic letter to Holt almost exactly 
twenty years before when he was agonizing to 
persuade himself that he did believe in the 
orthodox creed of his forefathers, show how 
long a journey he had taken. What a distance 
he had come since he wrote, "Either Christ was 
God or He was not. And if He was, we must 
take what He said as actual truth, not to be 
twisted or turned aside. . . . Through his name, 
his sacrifice, and his intercession and thus alone, 
can we inherit eternal life. I seem to see Him 
standing there . . . with a solemn earnest face 
looking at you and me . . . and saying . . . 
'he that believeth shall be saved — he that be- 
lieveth not shall be damned.'" 

From doubtful hope he had gone to hopeful 
doubt and sturdy scepticism and content — at 
moments even aggressive agnosticism, thus 
summing up in his own experience the religious 
history of his generation. 

June 9, 1885. 

Dear Mr. A , — Do you want to do 

me a great favor? I don't know in the least 
what your proclivities (or declivities) are in 
the way of religious matters, but I am going 



254 EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 

to assume that yours are not far away from mine 
— enough to ask you, if you are naturally in 
the way of seeing manuscripts, submitted to 
the firm for publication, to look into an essay 
I sent them (with some others) entitled "The 
XlXth Century " — along toward the end of 
it — and purloin certain pages treating of the 
Christian Church as a nuisance and fraud — if 
it is likely, otherwise, to be read by some mem- 
bers of the firm (I don't in the least know who 
or what they are) — some very conservative, 
elderly, religious, sensitive, choleric, old-fash- 
ioned gentleman with gold-spectacles and high 
collar, and a pew in church and gold-headed 
cane — who hates George Sand and Herbert 
Spencer (by reputation) and loves Joseph Cook. 
Is there such a fearful catastrophe imminent 
as that such a man should read my essay and 
be made really ill by it? 

If so (understand I know nothing at all 
about it), will you do me the friendly act to 
take out three or four pages that may seem 
very flagrant? There are only a few pages that 
speak of the church. (It is only the essay on 
Morals that I really care to get printed, and 
I believe that would not really hurt anybody's 
feelings.) 

It is asking a great deal to ask you to look 
at any manuscripts outside of the ones your 
own work bring upon you, I know. But I scent 



THE CRAFTSMAN 255 

orthodoxy in a note received yesterday from 
the firm, and it would simply offend an ortho- 
dox man — and uselessly, for he never would 
print it — to read the last part of that " 19th 
Century" essay. 

Sincerely yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Cuyahoga Falls, Nov. 18, '85. 

My dear Henry [Holt], — I am glad of 
what you say about the essays, etc. It is ex- 
tremely agreeable to know that one's old 
friends still keep one in mind and have a 
friendly interest in what he is doing. I would be 
glad to hear from you of tener and to know more 
in detail about your doings — inner and outer. 

As to the college presidency : — I do not 
feel sufficiently in mid-stream of educational 
affairs at the East and do not know the younger 
men likely to be candidates well enough to make 
any comparative judgment of so much value as 
that of others more in the midst of things; but 
I should be very glad to say in any way — pub- 
lic or private — that of all the men I know Mr. 
Gilman seems to me the best for the place. No 
one can be more thoroughly convinced than I 
am that the clerical element is a minor one to 
Yale College. Whoever is chosen for the head, 
I hope it will be no clergyman — no " Doctor " of 
an exploded ' ' Divinity . " In fact so thoroughly 



Z5Q EDWAKD ROWLAND SILL 

do I feel this that Mr. Gilman seems to me a 
little too much addicted to the old mythology 
and observances to be an ideal man for the 
head of the future college. I should find him a 
grain better suited to the position if we found 
him a little more frank and courageous about 
acknowledging that "it moves" and that it is 
time for some of the old things to pass away. 
But this view is perhaps not shared by the 
rest of you. You know my feeling that the 
Christian mythology and the Church grip on 
society are very hurtful things. They are more 
in the way of the progress of true ideas about 
man and life than all other influences put to- 
gether. Yes, Mr. Gilman, by all means. I don't 
know any man that compares with him for the 
position. By the way, who are the "half-dozen 
best men, 'anti-clericals'"? I don't quite like 
the idea of having this movement toward a 
national government of Yale "University " and 
Yale College from New York, as if it were from 
a coterie or clique. That notion will get into 
people's heads and damage the movement, if 
you don't look out. This is a rather large coun- 
try you know. Harvard is controlled by a pro- 
vincial clique. It is a Boston concern. But Yale 
belongs to the country in general. I don't think 
it was a fortunate thing that an exclusively 
New York Yale Club was formed just at this 
time. But I may be wrong. Stanford's twenty 



THE CRAFTSMAN 257 

million California University may get Mr. Gil- 
man ! What then ? 

Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Like every other author Sill yielded to the 
enchantment which distance lends to the edi- 
torial chair. Well for him and his poetry that 
he never attained its doubtful dignity! 

Cuyahoga Falls, 0., July 30, 1885. 

My dear Mr. A , — It was sufficiently 

overwhelming to find three things of mine 
in one number of the "Atlantic": and now 
your friendly praise really scares me. It is a 
rather delightful way of being scared, I admit, 
to get such words from a man who holds the 
place in my estimation that you do; but actu- 
ally I am afraid I never can do well enough to 
deserve them. And I don't know whether I 
shall dare send you any more things, without 
writing them over forty or fifty times and soak- 
ing them down for a year. 

Hedbrook here has a bunch of things, but 
has no courage to send them, at present. And 
there is a prose lingo about Humming Birds 
here in my desk. When I get over blushing 
I will mail some of them, or something else. 
But I beg of you to treat whatever I send with 
unrelenting justice of judgment, and send them 



258 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

back (if you will continue to be so kind as to 
take that trouble) without thinking it neces- 
sary to give any reason but their " unavailabil- 
ity," and that, too, in printed form whenever 
the spirit does not move you — or time does 
not allow you — to write. 

I wonder if you would not like to have me 
help in the preliminary sifting of your piles 
of manuscripts. I seem to lack suitable em- 
ployment at present, and one cannot be writing 
either polemics or poetry all the time. I can 
read manuscript very fast, and I could say very 
unkind things to the contributors of the worst 
material. (I should wish to leave it to your 
peaceful pen to say the kind things.) I Ve a no- 
tion that with proper training from you I could 
bear a hand somewhere about that work of 
yours; in its lower regions, at least, as a getter- 
through of preliminary drudgery. 

I thank you most heartily for your en- 
couraging and friendly words to me. 
Sincerely yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

During the summer of 1885 wide interest 
was excited in the project of Senator Leland 
Stanford, a California millionaire, to found a 
university as a memorial to his son, then lately 
dead. Sill was concerned that the university 
should deserve the name of a university. He 



THE CRAFTSMAN 259 

writes to President Gilman, of Johns Hop- 
kins: — 

Cuyahoga Falls, June 15, '85. 

My dear Sir, — Mr. Stanford has been 
so long shut up to the association with men 
whose talk is of horses that I think we should 
be prepared for some pretty low views — I 
mean shallow, short-sighted, sordid views of 
life and things; but I should think a man of 
your persuasive speech and tact in meeting the 
particular mind in hand on a given occasion, 
might easily make him see (for I think he has 
a sound enough judgment, so far as his percep- 
tions and opportunities give him data) that the 
only great things, so far in the world — with 
great and enduring reputations — and great 
power in the world — and therefore great 
glory for the doers or founders of them — have 
been those that have based themselves on deep 
and permanent needs of man. No fiddlesticks 
of an industrial college, or mechanics training 
school, or Dr. Newman affair — meeting only 
a newspaper demand, or demagogue demand. 

I wish he could realize the tremendous re- 
nown and power of Oxford and Cambridge — 
or of the big German universities, and figure 
himself as begetting such another. Can't we 
raise Bishop Berkeley's spirit (where is the 
witch of Endor?) to inflame him? 

What a thing it might be, out there in Cali- 



260 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

f ornia if lie only would ! To start, you see, free 
of the old load of accumulated rubbish, and 
with the advantage of all that has been learned 
by means of or in spite of this rubbish — It is 
great. 

But you don't need that I should say any- 
thing to you on this topic. 

I only wish you good speed if you have any 
opportunities to bring it about. 

As ever yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Pkes. Gilman, Baltimore. 

This letter to Holt recalls Sill's essay, 
"Should a College Educate," which appeared 
in the "Atlantic" the same month, and doubt- 
less provoked the correspondence: — 

Cuyahoga Falls, Aug. 11, '85. 

Dear H , — I '11 tell you just how far it 

goes (the argument for " studying what one dis- 
likes ") . It goes so far as great regions of study 
are concerned; like mathematics, philosophy, 
literature. Any man who has taught ten years 
in any large college knows that mere heredity 
(and early surroundings) produces acres of 
students who will not only dislike but hate and 
despise certain regions of effort and attainment; 
effeminate weaklings who have a wonderful 
scorn of all athletics; big brawny fellows who 



THE CRAFTSMAN 261 

contemn clean linen and delicate manners; 
musical temperaments that loathe any kind of 
hard work whatever; and hard workers who 
despise all music as effeminate; sons of West 
Pointers who think all scholarship is worthless; 
and sons of scholars who hate a military man; 
sons of civil engineers who can hardly be brought 
to read and write easy words; and sons of liter- 
ary men who think mathematics simply devil- 
ish torture. You've no idea of the extent of 
this till you teach a lot of youngsters. 

The awfullest fact in creation is this thing 
of heredity. I've no doubt you know plenty of 
splendid men who have come through scienti- 
fic training. The question is how much less — 
or more — splendid would they be for knowing 
the Zeitgeist of the ancient time as well as that of 
the present time? Would they be any the less 
efficient with a wider grasp on literature and 
the thought of the world outside their special- 
ties? The way to judge how much of the ad- 
mirable product came from the scientific and 
illiberal training, is to see how many perfect 
asses that training produces. Judge by the 
average product. And study it — as I have 
done — in the universities where they have 
both making side by side — the same raw ma- 
terial, the same length of time, but the two con- 
trasted curricula. 

Ask yourself this question fairly : How many 



262 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

people do I know who have learned German 
and French without being in any sense " edu- 
cated" persons; how many, on the other hand, 
who have learned Latin or Greek without be- 
ing in some sense "educated" persons? Why, 
nurse-girls and dancing-masters and hack- 
drivers know French and German better than 
the Ollendorff college classes do. Does it edu- 
cate them much? 

Then ask the same question as to the natural 
sciences, and compare with the humane stu- 
dies, — literoB humaniores. Which would do 
most for a young fellow, an hour with Spencer's 
"Data of Ethics " or an hour with a clam? Well, 
the one is philosophy, the other science. And 
a clam in a book is n't even half so efficacious 
as a clam in the mud. But our shield has two 
sides, no doubt. 

But I began this only to thank you for your 
friendly invitation. I am afraid we shall not be 
able to accept it, for health is the one thing we 
are after, and we must flee to the mountains 
after a little sniff of the ocean breeze, somewhere 
down East where it is cool and bracing. Thank 
you, too, for the information. Very likely we 
will try one of the places you recommend. 

Pardon my saying so many words on the 
educational question. I presume you and I 
would train a boy very much alike after all. I '11 
confide to you a comical fact (considering which 



THE CRAFTSMAN 263 

side I am arguing on). I've spent more effort, 
ten to one, on getting people interested in the 
sciences I'm interested in, than in the other 
studies (always excepting modern literature). 
I never met a boy or girl without setting them 
at my binocular microscope and getting them 
to hatch out tadpoles, and dissect chickens' 
brains, and all that. And I have always worked 
intensely to get young and old to read Spencer, 
Darwin, etc. My own private bent is toward 
natural history. 

The late summer saw the Sills at Gloucester, 
where their visit was long remembered by a few, 
at least. The cottage where they "camped 
out" was beside the sea, and faced the beauti- 
ful lava gorge where the tide rose almost to the 
piazza. They were both enthusiastic walkers 
and found the Gloucester Downs a constant 
delight: — 

" We are having a run on to the seaside for 
'health.' ... I wish you could see the Atlantic 
as it comes in on the rocks here on Cape Ann. 
I think the Pacific is never quite so fine, at 
least on any shore I have seen out there. . . . 
I wish you could see (and share) the queerness 
and prettiness of the place. We watch the 
fishing boats — sails of all sizes and shapes — 
flitting out to sea and in again. It is a much 
livelier harbor than San Francisco Bay, and 



264 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

has so much more life color, though not so fine 
sky and earth colors." 

On his return to the West, Sill saw Mr. 
Aldrich in Boston. Unfortunately he was 
very unwell, in consequence of an accident in 
Gloucester, so that the meeting to which he had 
looked forward eagerly was marred. Appar- 
ently the chance for a longer talk never came. 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., Oct. 13, 1885. 

My dear Mr. A., — Can you not tell Mr. 
Stedman (if his book is not yet beyond proof- 
correcting) that one, at least, of the "twilight" 
poets, namely, "Sill," would much prefer to be 
left out of his enumeration? He had me in his 
" Century " article. I am not a publishing author 
(the booklet of verses of which I think I sent 
you a copy — "The Venus of Milo," etc., was 
never published, and never will be), and so 
might escape being stuck in his catalogue, like 
a fly on a pin. Don't you think? 

I enclose a few things. I am embarrassed 
sometimes to know whether I have sent you 
something before or not. If I ever send a poem 
again that you have sent back to me, I beg you 
to forgive me and lay it to a mere mischance. 
I certainly mean not to. But I hate to burn 
the confounded little things up, sometimes, 
and they are liable to get misplaced. 



THE CRAFTSMAN 265 

It was a great pleasure to me to see you a 
few minutes. I had some things I wanted very 
much to talk to you about, and get your ad- 
vice on (not manuscript), but I was too unwell 
to do it then. 

Yours, E. R. Sill. 

The "sanctum mottoes" mentioned below 
have disappeared, but "the following" — a 
scrap of verse — seems worth preserving: — 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., Oct. 15, 1885. 
Dear Mr. A — , Andrew thinks it is neces- 
sary for me to add (but of course it is n't) that 
the sanctum mottoes are not for the magazine 
but for the editor, in reminiscence of a too-too 
brief visit. And as I am writing he must needs 
put in the following. 

Yours, E. R. Sill. 

To a Face Contradictory 

Two soft blue, warring eyes : one looks at me 
With lid a little drooping, wistfully. 

The other, wider open, does not fear, 

And will not hope, but watches to see clear. 

One hints of love; the other does not hate: 

One tells me "come"! the other warns me, "Wait!" 

The voice, at least, is single. That I trust, 
Because, — because I do, because I must. 



266 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

Shut, riddling eyes! or in the dark I'll woo, 
And my one voice shall speak and tell me true. 

Andrew Hedbrook. 



Cuyahoga Falls, O., Nov. 28, 1885. 

My deak Mr. Aldrich, — The Lord send 
you patience and a forgiving spirit if I trouble 
you too much about my things; but I want 
anything you use to be as good as possible, — 
and so : — 

In the last stanza but one of the Sister of 
Mercy, — "For touch of human company." 
Should it be " sympathy" instead of " com- 
pany "? 

And should this stanza be inserted next? 
(referring to the old people) 

"I know the thoughts they never speak, 
When children bring the birthday flowers. 
The (scanty) silent tears that burn the cheek, 
While night-bells strike the dragging hours." 

And should "his" be changed to "thy" in 
the first stanza? (I thought, in writing it 
"his," she might be supposed to turn from 
thoughts of him to addressing him.) 
Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Always feel free to substitute for any ac- 
cepted thing any later thing if you like it better, 
and reject the other. 



THE CRAFTSMAN 267 

His casual letters at the period are full 
of flashes of comment about books and writ- 
ers: — 

"George Eliot says, '"Henry Esmond" is 
a disagreeable story at the end — because he 
was in love with the daughter all through the 
book and then married the mother at the last' 
— yet I think it seems all right, as one reads 
it. Who would have had him marry the other, 
knowing her? 

"The orthodox people will not like things 
George Eliot says in her letters, and they will 
try to frown her down. But they will not suc- 
ceed. She was great, and good too. Let them 
cast stones who are better. She was clear- 
headed and rational, that's all; and had that 
faith in the Divine Wisdom that makes one feel 
sure the true is — in the long run — the safe 
and good. . . . 

"... I'm making acquaintance with an- 
other Frenchman I like: Balzac. He sticks 
some sharp and deep probes into the human 
heart. Like Thackeray, he makes one wonder 
4 if he means me.' 

"I go with you entirely about St. Matthew's 
poetry, and the Greek of it. 'How he does it' 
is by being that way, I suppose. But perhaps 
he is an example of the educational effect of 
keeping one's mind constantly in contact with 
the choicest of everything. Think what a 



268 EDWAKD KOWLAND SILL 

hodge-podge of influences most of us tumble 
around in, all our lives. 

"... This getting up in the morning wrong 
foot foremost is one of the chief ills of life. More 
fun overnight is what would keep us from it. 
But the prescription is like port wine and pea- 
cocks' tongues to the beggar. Going to bed 
early is sometimes a safeguard. I wish you'd 
write a magazine essay about the woes and 
wants of children, such as you speak of in that 
connection. It would do good. Parents don't 
mean to be mean; they need light. . . . 

"I have come to feel a good deal your dis- 
relish of poetry. A friend of mine writes to 
me that he lately said, 'I always despised it; I 
believe I am coming to hate it.' He was think- 
ing of the value of hard facts. But every now 
and then, at an odd moment, I feel that all the 
old charm of it: 'Das ew'ge, alte Lied' — (re- 
member that poem of Anastasius Griin in * Gol- 
den Treasury of German Song'?). 

"... Almost thou persuadest me to be a 
pessimist. . . . And we shall not be very bad 
pessimists (not pessimi pessimistorum) while 
we admit that after all it is worth living, for 
us, and worth trying for, for the future comers. 

"This world is not out of the woods yet by 
any means. — Meantime I hope you are keep- 
ing your soul as tranquil as circumstances will 
permit: taking the bird's-eye view, as medi- 



THE CRAFTSMAN 269 

cine, before each meal — and hearing, when- 
ever you wake up in the night, that ' sentinel ' 
who goes his rounds * whispering to the worlds of 
space' * peace.' — One must not expect to do 
very much more than the average. ... It 's 
a kind of greediness that circumstances always 
conspire to cure us of." 

Sill's own soul was not tranquil, particularly 
when he thought of college and of Yale espe- 
cially. He writes with becoming candor to 
Holt, who, however he may have felt then, it is 
plain from a reading of the passages on Sill's 
college life, came to have very much the same 
opinion as Sill about their alma mater: — 

Cuyahoga Faixs, Dec, '85. 

Dear H , — I might add as postscript 

that I consider it perfectly impossible to get 
Gilman made president of Yale. They would 
not do it even if there were no theological 
animus involved. And with that it is as if you 
should propose Bismarck or Herbert Spencer. 
Dwight will be president, and a pretty presi- 
dent he will be! Gilman may be an ordained 
"minister," but they know well enough that he 
would not consider the religious test in getting 
his faculty, and that is the unum necessarium 
in New Haven. The only possible hope would 
be to scare them into the idea that a big rival 



270 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

university was being projected, on advanced 
ideas. And why should n't it be for a fact? 
Probably you do not share my contempt for 
Yale College as an apparatus of liberal educa- 
tion. I have but a very feeble interest in it, 
or hope of its ever being anything but a sort 
of old woman's college, — a nunnery of the 
church. 

Christmas found Sill in a rather sombre 
frame of mind from which he tried with but 
imperfect success to rouse himself by jocular 
communication to his California friends : — 

"Don't you rather reluct at writing these 
last dates of the year? The illusion is strong 
upon us that it really is a dying away, bit by 
bit, of one more set of opportunities — possi- 
bilities — liveabilities — a sort of annual mys- 
tery, or Passion Play, of the End of Life. Then 
we slip over the ridge-pole into Jan. 1, 2, etc., 
and begin to go down — faster and faster — 
and forget the old days behind. — We wish 
each other 'merry' Xmas; how merry do we 
succeed in being? Somebody has been editorial- 
ing that we have no business to wish people, 
or be (except children) 'merry.' I deny his 
overwise assertion. ' We 'd ought 'o ' be merry. 
I can conceive a considerable number — or sets 
— of circumstances that could slide into this 
moment and make me merry. Could n't you 



THE CRAFTSMAN 271 

as to your self? I was merry for two minutes 

and a half this morning, when related the 

anecdote of the boy whose mother caught him 
in a lie, and tried to impress the story of Ana- 
nias on him. He had an idiot brother named 
Melchisedek. 'How that story would have 
scared Melchisedek!' quoth the boy, 'It don't 
scare me a bit ! ' 

[On the back of a Christmas card, represent- 
ing a woodland stream] : — 

"This is the bank whereon the wild Time blows 
Where poor professors might forget their woes — 
Where they their wiser faculties might find 
By leaving their unwiser Faculties behind. 
Thither, O Dean, oh! thither let us flee, 
And build no more a U-ni-vers-i-tee; 
We'll lie at ease, all quiet, calm, and cool, 
And yes — we'll have to have our little school, 
Line upon line — O, it will be too utter! 
Our little schools of fishes fried in butter!" 

Would it have been better if Sill had had 
his wish and become an editorial worker? 
Probably not. He was too much an individual 
and too finely organized for the endless routine 
of the desk: — 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., Dec. 27, 1885. 

Dear Mr. A , — Put this sheet away 

till a moment of (comparative) leisure; for it is 
not regular business pertaining to manuscript. 



272 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

Take it with a cigar — It often occurs to me 
after reading the " Atlantic," to comment on 
some article; to make an inquiry of a writer; 
to criticize some statement, or opinion; or to 
further it by an additional fact or suggestion. 
I am moved to write a note to the writer. In 
such a case I think of the Contributors' Club; 
but reject the idea, thinking the matter too 
small; or across the line toward "newspaper" 
matter, rather than "magazine" matter; or 
too brief. 

Many other readers must occasionally have 
the same experience. Why not, therefore, have 
a weekly supplementary " Contributors' Club," 
or " Bric-A-Brackish " issue — published in 
"Atlantic " color and shape — a kind of supple- 
ment — or "Party call " — or " Staircase Wit " 
or " Mother Carey's Chicken," hovering around 
the stern of the big ship. A place to put choice 
odds and ends : the broken food that is too good 
to be thrown away, but not good enough (or 
large enough, rather) to put on the table next 
time. A place where the most elephantine con- 
tributor might gambol a little. Where Miss 
Thomas's sprites might " tread a light cinque " 
— if that's what they did. 

Everybody must feel (at least I do — do 
not you?) the crying need of a weekly literary 
publication that shall be recherche instead of 
promiscuous. As good as the " Nation " in that 



THE CRAFTSMAN 273 

respect, only purely literary. See what we 
have: The "Literary World," sort o' Philis- 
tine, heavy, "more geniality than light" in its 
atmosphere. (What a devilish — literally — 
good thing that was of the "Nation" critic's 
on Howells's Harper debut! Who did it?) 
Praising everybody and everything — a " mush 
of concession"; the "Critic," very bright but 
Bohemianish and — what? 

What a good place to train an editor under 
your eye and hand — in this "Sub-Atlantic"! 
Could you not find goodish raw material in 
Andrew Hedbrook for such a place? But this 
is truly only an afterthought. The opportun- 
ity for the thing was my first idea. 

Wishing you a most happy New Year, 
Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

The scraps to Aldrich and the unnamed cor- 
respondents do not merely disclose Sill's mod- 
esty, which was genuine and deep, but hint at 
the spiritual unrest which seized him at times 
and was due in no small measure to a feeling of 
isolation: — 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., Feb. 5, 1886. 

Dear Mr. A , — I have no idea I am 

always able to just "hit it," but I send pretty 
freely, hoping you will never try to make your- 



274 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

self think a thing of mine is good, but will throw 
out whatever "strikes" you as dubious. 

Thank you for the friendly suggestions as 
to " collected poems." I shall certainly take ad- 
vantage of your kind offer and advise with 
you if the time comes. But I must try to have 
something better worth while, first. 

I am glad you are going to Europe and wish 
I were going too. Go early and stay late! — 
The opposite of Charles Lamb's procedure. 
But I shall miss your occasional notes — unless 
some rainy day you will send me one from over 
there, which I should greatly like. But I'm 
afraid the very address would recall only manu- 
scripts and the daily task. 

It does not cease to make me abashed and 
blushful to find so many things of mine in the 
magazine. I only wish I could send things of a 
quality up to the level of my aspiration. 

You have my heartiest wishes for a merry 
vacation and safe return. 

With the summer of 1886, Sill added a new 
correspondent to his list, to whom he had been 
drawn sympathetically by some distresses of 
mind or body from which she was suffering and 
he wrote her a series of letters full of good cheer 
and gayety — some of it, especially the last let- 



THE CRAFTSMAN 275 

ter, written four days before his death, touched 
with true heroism. 

The drama draws toward its close, all un- 
suspected by Sill or his friends, but none the 
less endowing these last letters with a peculiar 
interest, because they are the last and because 
they stop so suddenly and untimely : — 

Cuy. Falls, July 21, '86 — Monday. 
What color are your eyes? Are they witch- 
hazel? In [that] they seem to have some touch 
of the divining rod. If I should tell you I wrote 
"Individual Continuity," then you could not 
tell anybody you did n't know — and how can 
anybody keep anything from anybody unless 
he can tell them "I don't know." Or do you 
make metaphysical distinctions as to certain- 
sure knowledge, and are you capable of saying 
you don't know, with the agnostic mental reser- 
vation that there don't nobuddy know nothing? 
If I should say I did n't write it, then you surely 
could n't say you did n't know whether I did 
or not. Now the tree of knowledge is well 
known to be the tree of sorrow. Blessed be 
them as knows nothing. Besides, I don't know 
as anybody can know for sartin sure whether 
(interrupted at this point and the blots mean 
that somebody left my fountain pen wrong end 
up, and so — . Do you use an "Ideal Fountain 
Pen " ? They can furnish you one that will just 



276 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

exactly suit you) — whether he did or did not 
write any given thing. Often when I have 
written a sentence, I say to myself — who said 
that? In what book did I read that? There's 
a sentence or two, by the way, in this "Contin- 
uity" article (whoever wrote it) that it seems 
to me I have seen in print before. About na- 
ture's police that has (?) our faces in a rogue's 
gallery. Where have I seen that? I wrote a bit 
of verse once, "Lend me thy fillet, Love, etc. " 
(you never saw it, I guess), which for a year 
bothered me because I felt certain I had seen it 
somewhere. But it has gone around in print 
and neither I nor anybody else has discovered 
any predecessor, so far as I can learn. (I would 
quote some more of it, but I can't recall it.) 
— So you (no more of that kind of paper) are 
a great talker? How well we should get on, for 
I am a great keeper-still. Yet I don't believe 
in keeping still. I can't agree with George 
Sand (in " Isidora ") that " Quand FSchange de la 
parole n'est pas necessaire, il est rarement utile'' 
Unless one add to it that a considerable amount 
of it is always necessary. But I never could talk, 
myself. I am like poor Josef in George Sand's 
"Maitres Sonneurs," who couldn't woo in 
words, but give him his musette. If I could play 
the 'cello about seventeen hundred times as well 
as I now play it ill, I might talk with that. As 
to letters they seem to take so confoundedly 



THE CRAFTSMAN 277 

long to write. It is really no longer than one 
would be in talking, but being only one end 
of the telephone in continuous activity, it 
seems forever. If I could get a fountain pen 
that held ideas instead of ink, so that I could 
blow it full in a wink of the eye, and then let 
somebody else skit it along over the paper, — 
or if we had that machine which the coming 
man will have, — he never can be a come man 
until he does have it, — which shall write as 
fast as we can think — ! 

I like what you tell me about your experi- 
ence with the mind during music. I have never 
exchanged views on that topic with any one — 
never heard it mentioned, in fact, and have 
wondered how it is with others. Some day we 
will go to a Symphony concert together and 
I will turn on you in the middle of something 
and make you tell me what you are thinking 
about. 

Expectant attention won't explain the word 
difficulty when you have come plump upon it 
unexpectedly and still find it goes wrong. Will 
it? It is an interesting phenomenon. I won- 
der if we don't all of us have certain pet mis- 
spellings that we never have happened to get 
eradicated? I spelt " melancholy" with twoZZ's 
all my life till about five years ago. Happened 
to. I think friends ought to be able to pick up 
such things for us. But they won't. They 're all 



278 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

cowards. Yes, in fact all the club things in Aug- 
ust "Atlantic" are of my brewing, except the 
"Threshold Flower" and I wish I had written 
that. But don't tell. And as to Hedbrook, say 
you don't know. That answer always sounds 
modest, about anything. Besides, you don't, 
you know. 

Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

Cuyahoga Falls, Oct. 

. . . Have been for a week across the border 
into Northwestern Pennsylvania, among some 
wildish baby-mountains with some good woods. 
. . . Had some good walks in fine dark rugged 
forest places, and almost could imagine it was 
California. It makes us sentimental and home- 
sick when that occurs. 

After an hour spent in straightening out 
papers — cleaning up two tables (how they 
get rattled, these writing-tables, if one does not 
exercise eternal vigilance!) I sat down to do 
some "literary" writing — but the spirits refuse 
to communicate — and it must be letterary, 
instead. In the process of clearing up I put away 
a volume of George Sand's correspondence, 
which reminds me to quote (and translate) a bit 
of one I was reading last night. "You believe 
in the greatness of women, and you hold them 
for better than men. For my part, I don't 



THE CRAFTSMAN 279 

think so. Having been degraded, it is impos- 
sible that they have not taken the [mceurs] 
morals and manners of slaves, and it will take 
more time to lift them out of it than it would 
have been necessary for men to raise themselves. 
When I think of it I have the spleen; but I 
mean not to live too much in the present mo- 
ment. We must not be too much beaten down 
by the general ill. Have we not affections, pro- 
found, certain, durable?" 

I might quote also the end of the letter: 
"Does my laziness about writing discourage 
you? But you know very well how this fright- 
ful trade of the scribbler makes you take a 
scunner to the very view of ink and paper." 

It is the beautifullest early-fall weather to- 
day. Ah me and ochhone, what a days-that- 
are-no-more-ishness there is about it. You don't 
exactly have it in California — the leaves on 
all the vines have been crying all night and 
hang all kind o' shamed of it and wilticated — 
and the sunshine is yellow and still — no more 
dance in it, though the crickets have piped unto 
it all the morning. Melons are ripe and grapes, 
and the coal is being got in — black reminder 
of the frost bite to come. . . .This weather or 
sumpthin or other makes me kind o' wishful for 
a ticket to California. 

I am coming to feel that the one sole and 
only mark and test of a plebeian (where "all 



280 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

the little soul is dirt ") is this sticking them- 
selves forward. And that the only thing neces- 
sary to prove a person, to me, a natural noble- 
man, is the willingness — nay, desire — to 
stay out of sight and be unannounced. I have a 
perfect loathing . . . for these people that do 
this newspaper-puff business about themselves. 
— And, by the way, I don't like this thing of 
small poets writing sonnets (signed duly with 
their small names) to bigger ones. Do you? 
It's getting common and unclean. And the 
mutual sonnetteering of the small ones to each 
other. 

Boo'ful autumn days. "The flying gold of 
the autumn woodlands drift." Soon it will be 
"rotten woodlands drip and the leaf is stamped 
in clay." But we won't borrow trouble. . . . 
It's always pleasant to look forward to winter 
and think one may do some bit of worth-while 
writing. 

Cuy. Falls, Oct. 9, '86. 

How am I going to impart, or intimate, or 
break gently to you the gorgonian fact that I 
don't more than half like " Diana " ? Now why 
you should like it and I not is the puzzling 
psychological conundrum. I can throw but 
two glimmers on it : one, that it is written by a 
woman; for the man must be a woman in dis- 
guise, it seems to me. The other, that you have 
got used to a certain sort of straining at effect in 



THE CRAFTSMAN 281 

language — a kind of visible effort to be original 
and surprisingly fine in your Boston society. 

What about Meredith? Is he really known 
to be of the male sex? I have never heard a 
thing about him (her). Perhaps it is only the 
English (or Irish) view of woman that goes 
agin me. You see, Diana is after all a kind of 
quick-witted simpleton. Now I hate quick- 
witted simpletons. 

I don't like the way the book has of blurt- 
ing out about things that are not meant to be 
indiscriminately talked about. There is a kind 
of animalism underlying it all. 

What is the good of a novelist who says that 
somebody went late to the theatre and just 
in time "to meet the vomit"! Good Lord! 
And I think the scene between Dacier and 
Diana in the parlor, where there is the long- 
drawn-out fuss about kissing and pressing 
hands and other performances, is silly and 
sensual, both. If one is going to out with the 
animal matters, I like them said out frankly 
and briefly — not sort of dallied with, and 
slunk away from, and touch and goed for a 
half-dozen paragraphs. Oh, I 'm dead sure it is 
a woman wrote it. No man would have sillied 
so about the kissing the other lover's (the 
positively the last lover's) coat sleeve, and 
forgetting she was tampering with such a 
fierce and fiery and ferocious and fiddlesticky 



282 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

brute and tiger and monster of volcanic pas- 
sions — roused even through a thickness of 
best Scotch all-wool coat sleeve, plus silesia 
lining, plus a cotton shirt, plus an originally 
heavy and fine but somewhat worn and shrunk 
(owing to incautious washing with soapsuds 
and being ironed the wrong way of the goods) 
undershirt. 

Now you must admit that it takes a woman 
novelist to do these things. And I'll tell you 
why. (Going back on my high views of women? 
Not a bit of it.) It's because women are so 
plaguey smart, they can write novels — bright 
ones, too, with power in 'em — without having 
ever had a vestige of education. A mere man 
can't do that. And the education saves him 
from writing such stuff when he does write. 

Oh, come now — I '11 admit I read this story 
with a good deal of interest — and that there 
are memorable things in it. And I 'm going to 
read another of — hers. Which shall it be? 

I have n 't ventured to write before, be- 
cause I inferred you were so busy (for I can't 
but conceive you as pitching in head over heels 
into the first of a year's work) that I did n't 
think you'd more than glance at any letter I 
should write. I, too, have been busy lately. 
But not so much so but that I shall read every 
word of any epistle I may get from you. 

Yours, 

E. R. S. 



A 



THE CRAFTSMAN 283 

C. Falls, Monday Night, Oct. 11, '86. 

What kind of a woman was Diana to be capa- 
ble of going off and betraying Dacier's confiden- 
tial politics to the " Times "? Igit? The reader 
feels like Dacier — he does n't want to know any 
more about her. And don't you get tired of hear- 
ing that a character was always so brilliant in 
speech, so dazzlingly witty, — all sparkle and 
miraculous repartee, — and then when any 
specimens are quoted (passim, along in the 
book) to find them pretty flat and very 
labored? Nascitur ridiculus mus. 

What kind of a style is this: "He must be 
mad," she said, "compelled to disburden her- 
self in a congenial atmosphere; which, however, 
she inf rigidated by her overflow of exclamatory 
wonderment — a curtain that shook volumin- 
ous folds, leaving Redworth to dreams of the 
treasure forfeited." 

The book has your name on it still, in sign 
I was to send it back, so I shall not quote, but 
refer to, the last column and a half of p. 51 and 
first 1/27 52, to ask if that is witty and viva- 
cious and charming, or — awfully flat and 
trashy. Do they do that in just that way at 
Boston parties? If so I'd rather smash my 
china in the solitude of my chamber. 

But how "rammed with" ideas the man is 
— such as they are. A kind of seething brain — 
kept feverishly seething, with far-fetched allu- 



284 EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 

sions all-jumbled-together comparisons — as if 
soaked in green tea and genius and stupidity 
and brandy and tobacco. If I seem to be 
swearing at things, remember the pen is 
mightier when he swored. 

I would give a dollar and fifteen cents to 
spend the rest of the evening talking with you 

— about novels and people and a' that. 
" Lonesome "? You can't be — can you? — in 
such a crowd of brains and hearts. Or do you 
" loathe the squares and streets, and the faces 
that one meets"? 

I wish you could have gone to the woods 
with me this afternoon. Dark with thick oaks 

— still unchanged of leaf — with clumps of 
hickory bright masses of solid yellow — as if 
great wedges of sunshine cleaving the woods. 
Some western tints that you don't have — 
Peppridge lieblich red — and the maples that 
you do have — but all the trees a size or two 
bigger and taller than in any New England 
woods I have seen. Still, still, so that one hears 
a leaf drop here, or another there, and then a 
nut fall, and then a squirrel leap from one tree- 
top to another. But I would gladly have con- 
fided to you "how sweet" the "solitude." 
Can you get any real companionship out of 
the beautiful young people ? or do you find, as 
I, that the telephone wire crosses an abysm of 
inexperience on their part, and won't carry. 



THE CRAFTSMAN 285 

"Hello! What is life? " (Ans.) "lo — brrrrr — 
m-m-m-m — zh-zh-zh — brrmmzzzz — bang ! " 
How many times a week do you " go out "? 

(" Demanding thus to bring relief — 
What kind of life is this I lead? ") 

What is that quotation? I can't place it, or 
be sure it's right. 

Read "Tartarin sur les Alpes," Daudet. 

What a staggering lot of books the publish- 
ers turn out on a weary world ! What gabblers 
we are ! Gabblers that write, and gabblers that 
read — for no doubt it 's the demand that cre- 
ates the supply. But oh, for an hour, or a 
dozen, of good, honest, unrestrained talk — 
about hens, or buttons, or anything. 
Yours heartily, 

E. R. S. 

Cut. Falls, Oct. 26, '86. 

"What, silent still, and silent all? " You never 
get mad, do you? And retire to your tent like 
Achilles? I must Hector you then till you come 
out and fight. {Absit omen! I don't want to be 
hauled round Boston by the heels.) 

What would you rather study if you had no- 
thing to do but study, and a serene and com- 
fortable mind to study with? If you were like 
the old Boy who was always going to retire 
and "read the authors "? — Or — to enlarge 



286 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

the question — what would you do if you could 
do just as you were a mind to? — 

Questions suggested by my having just struck 
on a new branch of a favorite line of study with 
me. Grimm's "Teutonic Mythology." (Late 
edition by somebody who keeps referring to 
"Appendix " and then there is n't any Appen- 
dix.) You've read Max Muller, maybe, and 
some of his Indian translations? This com- 
parison of Religions — especially the Ancient 

— when one goes at it with his common sense 
about him (not " leaving off his wit and going 
in his — what was it? — doublet and hose "?) 

— not expecting to find any occult new light, 
but only new exhibitions of man's perrennial 
cravings, and guessings, and embodyings, and 
human-life projectings! 

Save all your earnings and compel an easier 
set of circumstances another year : Five pupils 
somewhere, with three good teachers to each 

— reporting to you once a fortnight. And I 
will live next door and keep a Tennis Court. 
Oh, Yes! 

Yours, 

E. R. S. ! ! ! 

C. Falls, Dec. 7, '86 — Tues. Night. 
I am having this oddish experience with re- 
gard to you : that the more I know of you the 
less I know you. But I suppose nobody ever 



THE CRAFTSMAN 287 

made anybody out through letters. (And per- 
haps not in any other way — either!) 

We have steam up at last, and the mercury 
may go down outside to zero (as it has done 
lately). We keep warm in the house. — I wish 
I knew what you know. I suppose you know 
Browning (I have not got hold of your notes 
yet, to see), but what else? Have you gone into 
the late-years explorations of old Egypt and 
Assyria? Have you read the translations in the 
"Records of the Past, " and Bunsen and Birch 
and Rawlinson, etc.? There is a fascinating 
difficulty in getting at any facts about the real 
men and women and their lives, for all the 
inscriptions and records. It interests me espe- 
cially as comparative religion and comparative 
ethics. I want to talk with you about ethics. 
How do you govern your life, anyway? By two 
or three amiable feelings, as Sanctissima does, 
and will have it that we all must or go to perdi- 
tion? When you have a girl that does n't care 
what she does, or whether she and things in 
general go to smash or not, what "why" do 
you bring to bear on her? 

The trouble about the books is the rhetori- 
cal flourish of them. Here is Samuel Johnson's 
new book about the Persian Religion — every- 
thing buried under rubbishy rhetoric and fine 
Bostonese. Lovely to me is the style of the man 
who just says yea and nay and there leaves 



288 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

it. Because I have reached an age when I want 
to know what is the plain truth about things. 
Which leads me to say I should like (or as an 
old Yankee friend of mine used always to say 
— I should admire) to look into that crystal- 
backed watch of yours. I hear it tick — in 
your letters. I want to shee wheels go wound. 
Neither have / read Bagehot's Milton. Must do 
it. Have read a good deal of Masson's tremen- 
dous "Life," have you? For Milton is great, 
to me. And Bagehot reminds me of Jevons. 
His memoirs (mostly letters) worth reading, 
or skimming from one good thing to another. 
Dry but human. He had a scheme (and tried 
it for a while) of hiring himself out for two 
shillings an hour to explore things for people in 
the British Museum. I wish I had known it! 
Did you never feel that you 'd like to employ a 
dozen or two people to look up things for you 
in libraries? 

Hochheimer. I don't believe in stimulants 
for you and me. They are only spurs to the 
Arabian — who needs only the touch of the 
naked heel. If you spur to-night, you'll lag 
to-morrow to pay for it. We'll do more in the 
long run for keeping the steadier gait. 

But friends of "the other sex " — good Lord! 
why not? People take this matter of sex too 
seriously. It is only a convenient appliance for 
regulating posterity. Aside from that (and 



THE CRAFTSMAN 289 

pretty much everything is aside from that), 
why should we have it always in mind? Ah, 
we shall do all that better, one of these fine 
days! 

The dream of the symphony has impressed 
me a good deal. I am thankful to you for mak- 
ing the effort to put it down in words. I wonder 
if it is on the surface that we all differ — and 
whether if we get in among the intricacies of 
the mind we are all the same. As if we all lived 
round a mountain — and we take each other 
in through labyrinthine passages — dim vaults 
— hollow spaces of shadow — and suddenly, 
the open heart of the mountains, lighted up and 
full of music — "this is my heart ! " " Why, — 
this too is mine " — for the centre was common 
to all. 

Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

This series of letters may be interrupted for 
two fragmentary notes to old friends in Califor- 
nia, the second — to Mr. Palmer — gathering a 
certain solemnity from being the last message 
to the Pacific Slope: — 

"I think of you as 'walking alone like the 
rhinoceros,' more and more as the years go on. 
For in face of the almanac, the years do seem to 
go on — hold back as we may. When I think 
how long I have been away from Berkeley I 



290 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

am driven to wonder that I ever hear from any 
friend there. For Time carries not only a 
scythe and mows, but a hatchet and splits. A 
good ordinary quality of love seems to last in 
this world about a year and a half or two years 
of absence — a prime quality of friendship from 
five to seven ! Hail, O Time ! thou splitter apart 
of mortals. Splititandi salutamus!" 

Cuyahoga Falls, O., January 1, 1887. 

I don't like the years to go so. I was not 
half done with '86 

I read this in Turgenieff's "Raufbold" last 
night: " Er hatte viel gelesen; und so bildete er 
sich ein er besitze Erfahrung und Klugheit; er 
legte nicht den leisesten Zweifel dass alle seine 
Voraussetzungen richtig seien; er ahnte nicht 
dass das Leben unendlich mannigf altig ist, und 
sich niemals wiederholt." 

So, to live is more than to read, and one 
might know all things and miss of everything. 
And so, if life is endlessly manifold, we may 
hope for good and great things, here or here- 
after. 

Cuyahoga Falls, Feb. 16, '87. 

Do you mean to say you have the bobolink 

already? No bobby would be fool enough to 

come here yet awhile. It is midwinter; except 

that we have less sunshine, even, now — and 



THE CEAFTSMAN 291 

mud instead of snow. When the bobolinks have 
come and the bluebirds and the song sparrows 
— oh my ! For my part I am meditating flight 
to Colorado Springs for the months of March 
and April — Mrs. Sill and me. Join us? Know- 
est anything about Colorado in spring? I don't; 
but it can't be worse than Ohio. Gastritis? I 
don't know it — by name; but I guess I must 
have had it for some two months now. Does 
it stand for indigestion (or un-digestion), mys- 
terious sorenesses and aches all over one's cor- 
porality; symptoms of all the horrid diseases 
one has ever read about; fathomless depression 
of spirits; wide-awake nightmares from day- 
light to breakfast time, planning out the details 
of all the woes that are imminent to body and 
mind? 

If such as these thy spirit move, then come 
with me and be my — fellow patient. 

It's a hard thing to find out any exact fact 
in this world. No man, woman or book can tell 
the least about what degree of the thermometer 
one can expect in Colorado in March. Do you 
not need to cut and run somewhere? Could n't 
you leave for a month or six weeks? " He that 
fights and runs away shall live to fight another 
day," you know. I think we shall start in about 
a week. Write me quickly how you do. Who is 
your doctor? I saw Dr. A. L. Loomis in New 
York. He is first-class. 



292 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

We are coming to last things. The note below 
to Aldrich was his last communication with an 
editor, as the note that follows was probably 
the last he wrote to anybody, and the visit to 
New York was his last journey from home ex- 
cept that to the hospital where he died. Of 
this farewell visit to Gotham Mr. Holt wrote 
in a letter sometime later : — 

"The e odi profanum vulgus et arceo' of an- 
other poet, used to be, to a marked degree, his 
feeling. When he was in New York, a few 
weeks before his death, all this had become 
wonderfully changed. He was at a hotel on 
Fifth Avenue, and astonished me by appear- 
ing in a high hat. He told me that he had 
come for needed rest after caring for sick 
friends. 

"I said, still more astonished: 'Why, some 
years ago, you told me that the rush of life in 
New York actually made you physically ill; 
and you gave that as your reason for hurrying 
through here once without even coming to see 
me.' 

"He answered: 'Yes, it used to be so. I was 
thoroughly morbid. I understand it all now. 
But I 've outgrown it. I don't want any better 
recreation now than to sit here and watch the 
stream of life go by.' 

"Many other things united with this to 
satisfy me that he had at last become a citizen 



THE CRAFTSMAN 293 

of the real world, instead of trying to live in 
worlds that he tried to make for himself." 



Cuyahoga Falls, 0., Feb. 9, 1887. 

My dear Mr. A , — Thank you for 

the Club manuscript. I am sorry to have 
troubled you about it. 

Thank you, too, for your friendly incite- 
ment as to writing. I shall be glad to pay heed 
thereto as soon as I can get into working order 
again. For two months I have been quite out 
of sorts. I am just back from a fortnight in 
New York, where some medical advice and 
some Wagner operas, and eke some symphon- 
ies, did me good; and I hope to be bombarding 
you with proses and verses before long. 
Heartily yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

The Devil was well; the 

Devil a poet would be: 
The Devil fell sick, and 

Devil a poet was he! 

Cut. Falls, Feb. 23, '87. 
I find we are to be delayed about going 
to Colorado Springs for two weeks probably. 
This interval I shall spend in Cleveland, at- 
tending to some necessary business there. I 
hope to hear from you there — address P. O. 
Do you think you're well enough yet to be 



294 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

trotting around the country lecturing? Yet 
it has compensations of good mental effect on 
body. Probably all you need is outdoor air 
and fun. A bluebird heard here yesterday and 
a peewee! Frosty for their poor little toes! 
What do you know of Colorado in April and 
May? Florida is damp, malarious, and noth- 
ing to do, I hear. 

Yours, 

E. R. Sill. 

The end was unexpected and shocking. Sill 
had gone up to Cleveland to the hospital, there 
to undergo a minor operation which was per- 
formed about February 24. It was apparently 
a success and he seemed to be recovering, 
when, whether as a result of oversight on the 
part of the nurse in charge, or of some unex- 
pected weakness in his constitution, he suffered 
a relapse and died on the 27th. 



IX 

AVE ATQUE VALE 

Sill's death left his friends inconsolable; so 
incomplete his life, so needless seemed his end. 
They were so confident, so happily expectant, 
of his future, and now, cut off in the full exer- 
cise of his growing power, he was gone, "and 
hath not left his peer." So it seemed to them in 
1887, — he was to them the fittest to carry 
forward the torch of poetry. Not that he had 
achieved his fame: that has been growing 
since, he might in fact have described himself 
without bitterness, in the words Hawthorne 
had used forty years earlier, as "the most ob- 
scure man of letters in America." He had cared 
little for fame: fame had cared as little for him; 
and outside a small group of discerning lovers 
of poetry the name of Sill was unknown in the 
world of letters. 

It is perhaps an idle question to ask why to 
his friends the sense of loss was so poignant. 
Was it not enough that he was gone and they 
were the poorer? But the quick, eager spirit 
was so untimely taken off, before its full fruit- 
age and expression. All the unfulfilled promise 
of his nature loomed before them as a tangible 



296 EDWAED ROWLAND SILL 

loss. They knew he had not beat his music out; 
nor fully conquered his old inhibitions and the 
checks and hamperings of doubt. It was plain 
that he had not gained serenity, and had 
never resolved into moral unity that duality 
and conflict of temperament which prevented 
full-throated song. The unrest and barren- 
ness of the time, the chill of doubt, the ag- 
gressive agnosticism of his generation had 
often laid constraint upon him. But they had 
seen him emerging into fuller power; they felt 
the growing sweep of mind, the firmer hold on 
life and its meanings; they looked in confidence 
for fuller tones, for a more sustained and loftier 
song. 

Were they deceived? I think not. The 
figure that emerges in the letters and autobio- 
graphical jottings is that of a finely tempered, 
aspiring spirit, attuned to all ideals — loving 
truth and emulous of perfection, continuing the 
struggle from year to year to gain mastery of 
his resources and his art. 

It is a very engaging figure. In his prime as 
in his youth he was a handsome man, slender, 
straight, and alert. He had abundant brown 
hair, large, melancholy gray eyes, and a face 
rather pale. He gave the impression always 
of a refined, delicate, even somewhat fragile, 
creature, so that Howells, who saw him but 
once, remembers him as "a still, shy, delicate 



AVE ATQUE VALE 297 

presence. " By the time he was forty he had had 
several break-downs from overwork, and had 
established habits of cautious regard for his 
health which of course reacted upon his atti- 
tude toward life. His movements were quick 
and precise, all his nerves and muscles being 
apparently most accurate in their adjustments. 
His laugh was spontaneous and contagious, his 
face was mobile, and his talk was illustrated 
with inconspicuous but frequent gesture. For 
all his fragile health he was an outdoors man, 
fond of trees and fields, keenly observant of 
leaf and flower; bird and beast. He has himself 
given us some hints of his personal peculiarities 
in one of his little essays originally printed in 
the "Atlantic." 

"For my own part, at least, I like to know 
that I am not so eccentric as I may have feared 
in various little 'tricks and manners' of my 
body or my mind. I am always pleased to meet 
people who wear their thumbs inside their shut 
hand; and who have square-toed shoes; and 
who like the taste of some cates when a little 
burnt; and who reluct at shaking hands; and 
who never sharpen the lead of a pencil; and 
who say 'good-morning' to the servants; and 
who reject the use of a spoon as being a thing to 
take powders in, or the milder nourishments 
of helpless infancy." 

But singularly enough the most striking 



298 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

portrait of Sill I have found is in a brief descrip- 
tion of an English poet who died in the same 
year that Sill graduated from college. I mean 
that remarkable prototype of the American 
poet — Arthur Hugh Clough — whose biog- 
rapher writes of him : — 

"His was a character not easy to describe, 
whose charm was so personal that it seems to 
evaporate when translated into words. He 
was a singular combination of enthusiasm and 
calmness, of thoughtfulness and imagination, 
of speech and silence, of seriousness and 
humor. . . . 

"On special occasions he would pour out 
the accumulation of his mind, but most often 
the stream remained hid, and only came to the 
surface in his poetry, or in little incisive 
phrases, most apt to engrave themselves 
sharply on the minds of his hearers. . . . His 
poems tell us of his perplexities, his divided 
thoughts, his uncertainties; those who remem- 
ber him will think rather of his simple direct- 
ness of speech and action, the clearness of his 
judgment on any moot point; above all, it is 
remarkable how unanimous all those who knew 
him are in expressing their feeling of his entire 
nobleness, his utter purity of character." 

This was the man to whom Sill might have 
addressed a poem that tells so much of him- 
self:— 



AVE ATQUE VALE 299 

To the Unknown Soul 

soul, that somewhere art my very kin, 
From dusk and silence unto thee I call: 

1 know not where thou dwellest: if within 
A palace or a hut; if great or small 

Thy state and store of fortune; if thou'rt sad 
This moment, or most glad; 

The lordliest monarch or the lowest thrall. 

But well I know — since thou 'rt my counterpart — 
Thou bear'st a clouded spirit; full of doubt 

And old misgiving, heaviness of heart 
And loneliness of mind; long wearied out 

With climbing stairs that lead to nothing sure, 

With chasing lights that lure, 

In the thick murk that wraps us all about. 

As across many instruments a flute 

Breathes low, and only thrills its selfsame tone, 
That wakes in music while the rest are mute, 

So send thy voice to me: Then I alone 
Shall hear and answer; and we two will fare 
Together, and each bear 

Twin burdens, lighter now than either one. 

The longing for perfect companionship — 
the verses just quoted were originally a pend- 
ant to a brief essay entitled "Wanted — A 
Friend" — was a phase of his wistful idealism. 
Not that he was without friends. Never man 
had warmer, more loyal, or more steadfast 
friends. Besides that first intimate, Damon 
and Pythias relation, closer than a brother's, 
with his classmate Shearer, which beginning in 
college lasted throughout Shearer's life, there 



300 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL 

were his friendships with Williams and Dexter 
and Baldwin and Holt, of the Yale group, with 
Palmer and Kellogg and Royce and McLean, 
of California, not one of which was broken till 
death severed the tie. His capacity for friend- 
ship lay partly in a flashing responsiveness, a 
lightning readiness to catch another's thought 
and join in sympathetic understanding. Says 
his friend Williams: "I never knew anybody 
else who caught one's idea so promptly as he. 
In all our talks on innumerable topics, I never 
had in a single instance to explain my mean- 
ing to Sill. He anticipated my idea before it 
was half expressed. And it was so in the case 
of everybody with whom he came in contact." 
Holt says: " Sill and Shearer did more for the 
culture and character of the class than did all 
the rest of the college, faculty included." 

Deeper than this lay what was the central 
and dominant motive of his life — the desire 
to serve. Just as his mind ran to meet another's 
thought, his whole nature ran to meet an- 
other's need. He longed to help. The desire 
runs like a refrain through his poems — 

"I would be satisfied if I might tell 

Before I go, 
That one warm word, — how I have loved them well, 

Could they but know! 
And would have gained for them some gleam of good: 
Have sought it long; still seek, — if but I could! 

Before I go." 



AVE ATQUE VALE 301 

It runs no less plain and strong through his 
life. "I often think," he writes from Cuyahoga 
Falls, "when I fidget after doing more work 
and more good — Oh, well. One must n't hope 
for the chance to do too much more than the 
average man. Now the average man does n't 
do anything." And again, "I am busy getting 
up a village aid society — awful weather for 
poor people without even potatoes and no 
blankets. Also making a new campaign for my 
struggling village library. . . . It 's a hard world 
to really do anything in — but Lord, how easy 
to talk /" 

This was the spirit that led him to send 
out his poems unsigned and made him shrink 
from any collection of them into a book. 
He feared and hated mere publicity. I shall 
not attempt to appraise his work. Most of it 
is lyric and stamped with the mood of the 
singer : no single work ample in plan, of large 
design and sustained power of execution ar- 
rests the attention. Yet the "Collected 
Poems," together with the volume of selected 
"Prose," form no inconsiderable achieve- 
ment in authorship. And it is of a definite 
type; the seal of New England is upon it 
all — the mark of restraint, clarity and 
moral elevation. Already time is sifting 
it, and some, perhaps much, of it will dis- 
appear; but much bids fair to last. Certain 



302 EDWARD ROWLAND SILL \ 

of his shorter poems like " Truth at Last," 
"Life," "Sibylline Bartering," "The Things 
that will not Die," " The Secret," have been 
widely quoted and reprinted in a score of 
forms, often without any reference to their 
authorship; in many cases it is likely with no 
idea of their author's name or history. His 
two most generally known poems — those we 
mentioned at the beginning of this record — 
"Opportunity" and "The Fool's Prayer," are 
known by thousands of people who have been 
chastened by them and had their hearts lifted 
up and their spirits purified by them, yet have 
never heard of their author. That is as he 
would have wished. He would have accepted 
his own doctrine : — 

"Let the great forces, wise of old, 
Have their whole way with thee, 
Crumble thy heart from its hold, 
Drown thy life in the sea. 
And aeons hence, some day, 
The love thou gavest a child, 
The dream in a midnight wild, 
The word thou wouldst not say — 
Or in a whisper no one dared to hear, 
Shall gladden the earth and bring the golden year." 

Sill came of Puritan stock; he was of the best 
New England strain; he was trained, as his 
father before him, at Yale. It is enough to say 
that he was bred true to type. He came from 
the proud little town of Windsor. She may 



AVE ATQUE VALE S03 

gladly record his name among her sons: for he 
is fit to hold a place with her best — with the 
Wolcotts, the Allyns, the Rowlands, the Ed- 
wardses, the Grants, and the Ellsworths. They 
would not deny him a place in their company, 
— not the procession of the Wolcotts, gracious 
gentlemen all, nor Jonathan Edwards the great 
theologian who towered in intellect above his 
contemporaries like a mountain peak, nor even 
the Chief Justice who stood worthily beside 
Washington himself. They all served their day 
and generation, and their descendant and fellow 
townsman bore himself like one of them. 



THE END 



INDEX 



Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 13, 95, 
190; letters to, 227, 229, 231, 
235, 236, 246, 247, 249, 250, 
251, 253, 257, 264, 265, 266, 
271, 273, 293. 

"Alice in Wonderland," 125. 

Anonymity, advantages of, 231 
235, 244, 246. 

Arnold, Matthew, 6, 175. 

"Atlantic Monthly," the, 6, 13, 
95, 181, 190, 191, 192, 193, 
194, 215, 235, 249, 272, 278. 

Baldwin, Simeon E., 12; letters 

to, 86, 200. 
Berkeley, Cal., Sill's life there, 

158-89. 
"Bohemian Glass," 105, 108, 

112. 
Boston Music Hall, 97, 98. 

Carlyle, Jane Welch, 208. 

Carlyle, Thomas, Sill's indebt- 
edness to, 25, 32, 153. 

"Cheerfulness of Birds, The," 
215-18. 

Christianity, 56, 77 el seq. 

Civil War, the, 82. 

Clough, Arthur Hugh, 298. 

Cuyahoga, Falls, 9, 88, 215, 
220. 

Dexter, F. B., letters to, 55, 58, 

71, 120, 182, 199. 
"Diana of the Crossways," 

280, 283. 



Eliot, George, 181, 267. 
Emerson, R. W., 143, 152, 209, 
230. 

Folsom, Cal., 52; Sill's life 

there, 59, 60, 61. 
Fuller, William H., 230. 

Germans, the, and their schools, 

175; compared with the 

French, 224. 
Gilman, Daniel C, 169, 269; 

letters to, 170, 171, 173, 176, 

187, 259. 
Greek letter societies, 19, 22. 

Harvard Divinity School, 80, 

88. 
"Hedbrook, Andrew," 249, 250, 

252, 257, 265, 273, 278. 
"Hermitage, The," Sill's first 

book, 80, 90, 91, 100, 178. 
Holt, Henry, letters to, 67, 69, 

75, 80, 88, 90, 92, 95, 99, 101, 

102, 118, 123, 168, 178, 179, 

181, 230, 238, 240, 255, 260, 

269. 
Howells, W. D., 196, 296. 

Immortality, 36, 76, 212. 
"In Memoriam," 77, 239. 

Kant, Emanuel, his poetry, 211. 
Kellogg, Martin, letter to, 206. 
Kernochan, Francis E., 230. 
Kingsley, Charles, 56. 



306 



INDEX 



Le Conte, Professor John, 233. 
Leland Stanford University, 
258. 

"Man the Spirit," 133, 148. 
McLean, Rev. J. K., 162. 
Memorial of Edward Rowland 

SU1, 149. 
Meredith, George, 281. 
"Midnight," 33. 
"Morning," how it was written, 

17, 30. 

"Nation," the, 100. 
"News Girl, The," 114. 

Oakland, Cal., 128; Sill's life 

there, 133, 134, 147. 
"Overland Monthly," the, 190, 

228. 

Palmer, C. T. H., 60, 61, 122, 

128, 289. 
Phillips Exeter Academy, 9, 

10. 

Rowland, Rev. David S., 3. 
Rowland, Elizabeth Newberry, 

4. 
Royce, Josiah, 137, 170, 173, 

176. 

Sacramento, Cal., 51, 53. 

Sand, George, 226, 243, 254, 
276, 278. 

Shearer, Sextus, 21, 22, 27, 63, 
70, 80, 86, 299; his illness and 
death, 122, 123. 

Shinn, Millicent, reminiscences 
of Sill, 134, 158, 160; letters 
to, 145, 183, 184, 195, 221. 

Sill, Edward Rowland, his an- 
cestry, 1; his birthplace, 1; 
his parents, 5; his school days, 



9, 10; his life at Yale College, 
12-34; his appearance, 24-28, 
29, 84, 296; his undergradu- 
ate writing, 29; his self-criti- 
cism, 39; his voyage 'round 
the Horn, 37-50; his scien- 
tific tendencies, 40; his first 
sojourn in California, 51 et 
seq.; studies law, 57, 83; 
studies medicine, 59; reads 
theology, 65; his early love 
affair, 66; his religious views, 
75-80, 177, 239, 241, 253, 
255; as abolitionist, 83; con- 
siders going on the stage, 84; 
his marriage, 93; at Cam- 
bridge, 94; as translator, 99, 
101; gives up theology, 102; 
tries journalism, 103 et seq.; 
as teacher, 116, 120, 124, 125, 
126, 134, 138, 149-58, 164, 
180; as writer, 130, 191, 220, 
222; his second sojourn in 
California, 131 et seq.; memo- 
rial of, 149; resigns professor- 
ship, 178, 189; visits Europe, 
183 et seq.; his last visit to 
New York, 292; his person- 
ality, 296. 

Sill, Dr. Elisha Noyes, 4. 

Sill, Elizabeth, 9, 93. 

Sill, Dr. Theodore, 4. 

" Song of the Horse, The," 111. 

Spencer, Herbert, 180, 192, 
254, 262, 269. 

Stearns, R. E. C, verses to, 189. 

Stedman, Edmund, 264. 

"Summer Afternoon," 107. 

Sumner, Charles, 143. 

Tennyson, Alfred, 36, 72, 77, 

81, 100. 
"Timothy Grass," 105, 108. 
" To the Unknown Soul," 299. 



INDEX 



307 



University of California, 116, 
181, 148, 170. 

"Venus ofMilo, The," 190. 

Ware, Sir Thomas, 1. 
Williams, Ralph O., memories 
of Sill, 27, 300. 



Windsor, Conn., 1, 3, 5, 8, 36, 

202, 204. 
Woolsey, President, of Yale, 17. 

Yale College in 1857, 13-21; 
compared with Harvard, 23, 
34; conditions in 1885, 238, 
255, 269. 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



